HUM

Ecstasy

ECSTASY   MARK WILLIAM NORBY

RECALL:  BERLIN-SCHOENEBERG

Must the morning always return? Will the despotism of the earthly never cease? Unholy activity consumes the angel-visit of the Night. Will the time never come when Love’s hidden sacrifice shall burn eternally? To the Light a season was set; but everlasting and boundless is the dominion of the Night.    –Novalis

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Ecstasy may refer to: Ecstasy (emotion), a trance or trance-like state in which a person 

transcends normal consciousness

Religious Ecstasy, a state of consciousness characterized by expanded spiritual awareness, 

visions or absolute euphoria

Ecstasy (philosophy), a term used to mean "outside itself”

Ecstasy (drug), a colloquial term for the drug MDMA

How foolish I was to think that my God had abandoned me. I am good, but not great. At eight, I lived in a world in miniatures. Not unlike most children, in the basement where I had spent my time, I had built a city of miniatures. In this miniature city, I was the mayor, but my name was different from the name my mom and dad had given me. My name as mayor of the miniature city was Gary, and Gary lived in the town’s only house. The house was yellow and white on the outside, red and black on the inside, the little yellow plastic walls repainted by a set of magic markers I used to create red and black striped walls all on the inside. Gary had a car, a lime-green Mercedes Matchbox from the local—and first ever in the world—Target store. The lime green Mercedes usually sat in the driveway of the yellow and white plastic house where all the town could see. Since there was only one house in the miniature city, my young imagination placed all of the other residents outside the borders of the city’s central area, a six-by-six foot section of plywood that my dad had given me, and upon which I could build my miniature world.

My dad covered the six-by-six plywood with a piece of scrap of green carpeting like the kind found in the pro shops at golf courses or country clubs, a flat material designed for heavy wear and tear. The city was covered in beautiful green grass. For roads, I found a big roll of electrical tape and used that, making two lines of the shiny black tape side by side so that the roads were wide enough for my Matchbox cars to drive on them. With nothing but green carpet-grass over a six-by-six section of plywood, electrical tape for new roads, and a house for Gary to live in with a black driveway for Gary to park his lime green Mercedes, I set out to build Little City, a refuge from the world around me.

The first business I purchased for the Little City came in the form of a plastic model kit from Target. The kit allowed me to assemble and glue together an automobile showroom and this became the city’s first business. Naturally, Gary owned the auto showroom. I began to purchase little people which were a little shorter than matchsticks, so that Gary would have some friends and so that his business also would have some customers in order for Gary to generate income. I knew that it took money to buy the model kits for the city, so I knew money is the thing that Gary needed in order to continue to build out the city. It was a kind of partnership between Gary and me: he had to do business with people in the city so that he could make more money and build more businesses. I appointed Gary mayor of the city and as the richest, most powerful person, he continued with me to build out Little City.

The town had a Lionel train set whose circular tracks traveled around the perimeter of Little City. On the edge of town, not far from Gary’s house, stood the City Zoo, filled with a set of plastic giraffes, plastic elephants, plastic hippopotomus’, plastic tigers, little ceramic penguins that I got from my mother’s china cabinet, a set of plastic panda bears, a few plastic seals, and a green plastic fence that encircled all the animals and kept them under control. The town had a plastic firehouse and a gas station, both purchased at Target. There were plenty of cars—Corvettes, Cadillacs, various trucks, hot rods and a few little motorcycles. The town grew quickly and more people started to come to Little City, but only the one house for Gary, mayor of Little City, stood within the town’s borders.

At first, there were five or six other matchstick people in Little City for Gary to associate with and to become friends with. Gary kept his distance, however, and focused more on building and acquiring new businesses. At the time, the film “The Towering Inferno” was the big motion picture release of 1974 that summer and I had gone to see it with my mom, dad and sister. Instantly, it became my favorite film and I had to have a skyscraper in the city that looked like the building that became the Towering Inferno in the film. Since my dad worked in the printing industry, he had access to useful materials with which to build objects that resembled what would become the Towering Inferno in Little City. He came home one day with a three-foot tall three-dimensional rectangular box that he had constructed for me at his work. Think of a milk carton’s dimensions but only this one was really long, tall enough to resemble a skyscraper in Little City. I took a thick black marker and drew lines down the length of the box and also perpendicular across it to resemble windows. The skyscraper, not only the tallest building in Little City but also the tallest building in the world, I placed in the very center of town. In the film version of “The Towering Inferno,” as the world’s tallest skyscraper burned, a lifeline cable had been extended from the burning building to another, shorter building next to it. On this cable, some of the occupants of the burning building were sent across over the cable in a metal fire rescue chair that carried them to safety to the other secure, shorter building. I had to have a building in Little City that served the same purpose as in the movie. I made a much shorter building out of a 2% milk carton. In the film, the shorter building had no particular identity, it was just a building, perhaps an office building. In Little City, I turned the milk carton into the Skyway Theater, one of the nation’s first multi-screen movie houses located on Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis, where I had watched “The Towering Inferno” with my family. I constructed a little sign above the building’s entrance that read Skyway Theater, as well as a large marquee above the entrance to the milk carton building with the names of the films that were showing written across it with my thick black pen. The films showing back then included “Shampoo,” “Benji,” and, of course, “The Towering Inferno.”

As time passed, the summer heat caused the plywood underneath Little City to warp. Over time, the six-by-six section of plywood began to warp upwards, so that the corners of this miniature world turned up towards the ceiling, making it a place that looked like it had been built in a kind of shallow bowl, or valley, and this warped-ness bothered me. Life went on in Little City, but the irregularity of the town’s appearance made me feel that my town was not working. The train tracks curved inward to the center of Little City and the train could no longer travel around the town without the little locomotive falling over and off its tracks, followed by the rest of the cargo cars that spilled over the surface of the warped town. Something was very wrong in Little City. I collected a box of large bricks and anchored each corner with a set of them, hoping that the weight of the bricks would “un-warp” Little City and things could return to normal again. It did not work. For a long time, maybe a year or more, Little City had been a success. Gary was a popular mayor, he sold plenty of cars at the dealership, the world’s tallest skyscraper kept the town in awe, the Skyway Theater offered all the latest hit movies, and the train ran on time. All the animals in the town’s zoo were happy. But when I found out that the bricks were not doing anything to correct the warping of the wood beneath the town, I began to lose interest in the place. By summer’s end, I staged my own “Towering Inferno.” The town, now in a state of disrepair, seemed abandoned. I removed the skyscraper from the center of Little City, took it outside, away from the house to an open field, planted the building firmly into the ground, and very ceremoniously set it on fire. I played the drama of the film in my mind as I watched my Towering Inferno burn; the white rectangular box and its drawn-on windows went slowly up in flames. I held a bundle of lit matches to the cardboard and gradually the flames overtook it, turning the white to brown and then black, and then as the flames burned through the cardboard, the burning edges of it lit up in a flaming glow like white Christmas lights, and slowly the awe of Little City was no more.

Twenty-eight years later, I leave India’s Sri Aurobindo Ashram really early, like 5 a.m. After spending three days and nights locked up there I was well ready to get out on the streets of Pondicherry. Strict vegetarian meals − yogurt, rice, lentils, that was it. Craving a hard cup of coffee after all that shanti-shanti business I launched onto a coffee bar located on the second floor of a Chevignon Jeans shop, like Levis only French. The coffee bar was as western as you get with lots of seating room and clean tables with paper napkin dispensers, something unheard of almost anywhere else in the city. BBC News played on the overhead television.

Vision of Truth hits me, a flash-forward into the reality of seeking: I approached the wood counter and order a latte. The Tamil boy positioned himself behind the Italian espresso machine, the one that looked just like those everywhere in the States, like the front of a ‘50’s Chevy, running out luscious streams of thick black liquid and rising steam. While he spun the levers and assembled cup to saucer I turned and looked up at the BBC. BAM! A plane flew into a skyscraper. BAM! Another jet hit the other skyscraper. 

I turned to the boy and ask him, bewildered, “What was that?”

“That, my friend,” his Tamil accent dipped, then continued, and his head cocked toward the television: “That is America!”

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General Mohnke, aware that the Russians had already stormed the Charité, decided to            give it a wide berth. The group could hear wild Sabine screams piercing the Berlin night.                        As one of the soldiers put it, “I had been in Russia, so I knew there were two sides to               this ugly story, atrocity followed by counter-atrocity. 

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I trespass into time and meet there gay witch communist atheist Jewish boy called Franck born in Istrian Croatia and raised in East Berlin during the era of the DDR. The Berlin Wall has fallen, it is 1993, the section of der Mauer – the Wall – between East and West at Kreuzberg let open the floodgate of youth that is us, but I am American come to take the drug that is the City of Weimar, this New Berlin, die Wiedervereinigung –Reunification – that leads the way to our spiritual breakthrough at the dissolving shadows of our fear calling us to love, to feel the ecstasy of life, in all of its forms, its light, its dark, its wonder gently pushing us to embrace God in his creatures of all kinds, to let the evil in the world catapult us to love more freely, to hug the children of this earth in confidence to let them know they are safe, we are their protectors. Franck. Born in a tiny town called Hum, in what is today ex-Yugoslavia Western Croatia. Hum was a part of Marcus Aurelius’ attempt to establish Marcomannia – a large East and Central European region under Roman Law, but the tides of history shifted so that the region remains rather a lost dream than a Roman Territory. Prague – Praha 8 – is a city that would have fallen within the boundaries of Aurelius’ Marcomannia. However, Berlin – like Marcomannia – is that place almost outside time, Weimar is the place outside of Time, a place of endless creativity. Outside is where this story, this New Berlin, begins. 

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BERFORE THE BERGHAIN

Whales sing the elegance the calls in the dark the smell of the leather sweat. It is music to the ears taste of the animal hide to the nose-tongue if you taste the air, dark at every corner guided by blue spots purple spots at the ceiling edges here, there, only these lights the whales calling the leather sculpting the shirtless ones standing some kneeling others bent over. Extinction in the back room this is the love affair with death, heels of boots meeting the floor turning a corner to another room. Lower level beneath the bar, the Kellar where men randomly feel but do not so much as see other men. Yes that’s a hard cock protruding from his jeans, eager for my hand. I touch him he lets out a groaning sigh of weird beastliness. The Kellar beneath the bar, dark, a little blue, purple to accent the dark. The whales cry one, the next, a herd migrating overhead. Oh Berlin! You turn me on, this man in my hand Tom’s Bar upstairs this refuge below feeding these endless urges which are never sated, never sated. This whale whispers in my ear that she is dying, dying for love. This man wants to fuck me. He wants to fuck me in the Kellar, the whale is in my mind now I believe that I am guilty because of this whale. She is telling me to not be selfish while I unhinge my belt, drop my jeans. I have no idea how this man is going to enter me, lubricated or not, with force or gentleness, is he here for me too or is this all about him. The whale wants me to give in: her migration depends on my willingness to submit. I submit. He pushes in magically without resistance on my part, the head of his cock succeeding to drive through the ring of my hole. It is a revelation to allow him in me as I brace the brick wall with the palms of my hands. He is moving-in unafraid but aware of this delicate balance between unwanted pain or, my further submission. I submit, I choose to submit wantonly give in because it is not in my hands, I am not in charge. I am happy. There is a sense of pain in my body that I love. I am not in control. I close my eyes so even the blue in the dark, the purple in the black, leave me in total inner midnight. I feel the stubble of his shaved groin needle into the flesh of my ass while he clutches the front of my pelvis, his grips pulling me back into him further until there is no separation between us. He begins to thrust without letting go of me; I feel my roots in the anus grab hold of power inside of me. The whales come swimming by coaxing me to cum. He grips my cock like an extension of him in me. I have a belief this will last endlessly. He exhales deeply, reaching a point inside seemingly unknowable but this is how we were built. One man, to one man, I am going there. I think go ahead, release your self. I have nothing to lose. I am in love with the unknowing, this nameless experience; I would give this experience away, it has no price, I could not pay for it. If I wanted to know him this could never be. I surrender to the unknowing as if God was standing at my feet. Please let go, I am in your hands entirely. I release myself as he thrusts in still deeper letting go of all of him as tears roll out the sides of my eyes. My chest heavy in sweat, I wrap my mouth around the leather on my forearm bite into it. He pulls back his head, pulls out where it had entered adding to the aroma of the Kellar. I am full, no longer half a man. I open both eyes to again see darkness accented in blue, purple, but more scent. I look back behind me he is gone. Vanished. No trace. A second of dejection enters me, but it is pointless: I realize I am not down in the Kellar to find love. But I have found it, whatever it is. 

Two-thirty a.m. This new stranger my age is alone I am alone he is clearly already high on MDMA at Tom’s Bar. I can readily see it; I know it so well; it is on this particular drug that there is no hesitation or squeamishness in meeting a total stranger. All separation is gone. We exchange names as I order a bottle of Becks to reorient after the stranger in the Kellar. Franck is in the zone outside time scattered by brief interludes of recognition of the present. I am standing with him, his eyes roll back his head drifts back the chemicals transforming the upstairs bar from just another mundane gay watering hole to the only place on earth. I know this feeling intimately. I love it, it is the deepest escape I have met where night after night my body surged in the ecstasy of toxins in another city. I have not enjoyed the sensation of chemical escape this morning, yet. I wish to join Franck in the feeling. I trust this German boy knows where to score I am willing to go anywhere to get it. He laughs around my question of where we can go to get it. I tell him I was told der Bunker always has loads of drugs, all drugs, a techno drug store. Specifically, it is Gabba Nation. A Gabba drug store. Gabba the original hardcore techno music out of Rotterdam–a deafening auditory assault. 100% electronic. The auditory assault of Gabba in the Nineties–comparable to the auditory assault of Jazz music in the Twenties, but Gabba is magnified to the final degree via technological progression. I slam down a shot of Jagermeister order one more Becks drain the bottle we leave. “We go by Autobus 10 then another, acht, number 8. Geil ist es I’m so fucking horny.” He cranes his neck sucking my neck it is first wet juicy lips then animal tongue lick followed by a quick sharp bite. His freedom drives me wild I turn erect, never sated, never sated my sex drive recovers always like a rabbit. 

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Der Bunker Klub. Gabba hardcore techno is God consciousness like everything is God consciousness, only God has a habit. Gabba consciousness, Gabba is nightmare music to the Mittelschicht but on GHB or Amyl Nitrite or both together it is as if I have no responsibility to return to the world of normality. Ecstasy. Der Bunker in Berlin-Mitte pounds 180bpm Gabba for 72 hours straight every weekend. Franck pays both our covers 10 Marks each. A few steps in noise-beats shatteringly violent for a purpose, to escape the world outside. His lips move rapidly followed by the gnashing of teeth to tell me something–NOISE–I hear him not. I enter his ear hating to yell but what else. “I can”t hear you!” Franck grabs my head with both hands the left one covering my face the right my parietal eminence, pulls my skull’s ear onto his lips. “We go upstairs, fucking drugs are upstairs,” he’s coming down rapidly or the fierce pounding mixes up his internal chemical balance further melding him within drug noise. I lead us up a few concrete stairwells having been on drug hunts many times before. In hunting I have no fear, it is my mission to conquer the task. It is not so much that I feel I have to get high but I want to be high with Franck. It is the wickedest Boy Scout Drug Scout combination both captured together. My eardrums must be bleeding. Very scant lighting many strobe lights turned up to as close to 180bpm Gabba as mechanically possible. Franck pulls at my jacket I scrape down two steps to the concrete landing between the concrete stairwells that ascend upward to where we are going I know exactly what he’s doing, he’s high horny as fuck wants to drive his tongue into me he does, with the individual determination of our tongues instantly mixing saliva I can taste chemical, bitter pill residue seeping out of his oral pores. Total blackness. Pounding pounding pounding. Pounding hearts 180bpm Gabba pounding Gabba strobes pounding me, pounding us. Hell-Heaven. I love this. I had blown a few tens of thousands of dollars on rave parties in another city, der Bunker in Berlin-Mitte is my purgatory I can live in, endlessly. I am his now I want him to be mine insatiably as I feel him, I feel the force of the front of his jeans I know he has a big German cock. I have no standards here any morality, I am committed to it. I have nothing to fear he is still high enough that there is no barrier, only intensity. Franck’s eyes are formidably dilated so that I can see into his head: he is a raw drugged-up leopard. He has this dirty-brown hair that looks like he’s been up for three days. He has. It is the look of high-pro glow. We clutch each other’s hands up to the webs of them all of the fingers interlaced. He sinks his tongue his lips into my mouth pulls out releases the right grip pulls my hand, my arm lifts we leap two concrete steps at a time to reach a room at the top where one of many DJ’s play.

I hand him forty Marks. He disappears into drugged-up bodies that are family to me. He returns in less than two minutes pushes the pill into my mouth, then his, we swallow, smile to each other French kiss sit on a concrete slab butting the wall behind the DJ he takes out two cigarettes from a pack sticks both between his lips lights both at the same time sticks one between my lips. In twenty minutes we 17will begin our quick ascent. MDMA Ecstasy is my Christmas I had always dreamed of. No life, nor death to push in on either end, this drug together with Franck is the only love I recognize. He is the only love I wish to recognize.  This chemical is a rush of warmth, a shot of disoriented expansion with all of the limits of life taken away, I can see my future it contains a sea of humanity who have all given in to the simplicity of open hearts embracing the wonder of creation. I love Berlin it is so goddamned fearlessly fierce I love this club this music is insanity I love every second, millisecond, two beats contained in one second to make 180bpm Gabba: the techno has broken this unreality of universal oneness but only for a moment. Can you hear it? Pounding. “You feel it?” Franck says. “Yes it’s so fucking conflicting with Gabba!” I say. “Conflicting” Franck says. “Widerspruchlich,” I say, he nods, “Na ya! Ah man! I am so high, so fucking high.” His skin glows brighter he looks astoundingly perfect. I feel as if I am standing on a Launchpad the space rocket before me I expect it to lift off with fire jets shooting flames but the floor of the Launchpad suddenly drops out I am floating in space; we are two satellites orbed in 180bpm Gabba, the beats peaking at 220bpm Gabba so fast it leaves life breathless, Franck is sensual in the delirious electronics. 

We are sitting rolling our minds he is screaming in my right ear. Gabba, says Franck, is “…German peoples, brains inside-out Man, der Bunker was the Hitler’s shelter, so the German’s youth make everything what is in Germany insane. All of the German’s history, Sozialismus, oppression, war now it is super fucked up dance party all the night!” The English I can understand. “The German’s youth taking again their city but even they do not know what they will do with it.” My neurotransmitters record every beat word light smell wave of chemical, historical cracks in the walls. “You will never see Germany like this in future, we are so free now. I am from the Osten Teil, the Eastern part of Germany. We are now one new Germany five years only old still. Nobody can know what is happening for the future.”

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We stand in darkness surrounded by light

–Ryszard Kapuscinski 

Franck shares that though hey grew up in East Berlin and is now an ex-pat Wessie or sorts he actually was born in Croatia, in a tiny town by the name of Hum, Hum being the smallest town in the world with a population of 12, an active mayor and even a hotel. “Yes my mom and dad decided to leave Croatia when I was a baby, just two years I was then my father decided not to be part of the Yugoslavia Communisms and to be instead Soviet so we emigrated to Eastern Germany, DDR. Every Wessie would think we are insane, to be in the Soviet Communisms rather than Yugoslavs Communisms, the Yugoslavs could purchase Mercedes and Italian jeans and in DDR we have to wear only factory clothes. I am thanking God DDR did not survive.” 

I know it is profound the meeting of the two of us and the meeting of East and West Berlin. The “Wessies” Franck speaks of, I am one of, not of West Berlin but of the States, which is in a way even more extreme “Wessie” – Westernism gone amok. Monism to Consumerism. “Franck is your father alive?” He looks up he seems suddenly sober and also I feel it: “My father was Alkoholichar and is now dead. My father was a writer but could never stop the drinking, always Soviet vodka in his hand, at him typewriter. I hope I am able to stop drugs also to save me from death!” Laughing in a way of his total self-awareness, his words stick to me. I know I, Max, have this uncontrollable delight in intoxication but will surly kill myself if a modicum of control never lifts its head into mine. 

Though I can see the future it is nebulous. High or not high I wonder about Ecstasy, why is it on this drug I can approach total strangers anywhere – I’ve done it dozens of times in another city – in the supermarket or on the subway – there is no rejection from the other not-high person, no question why I would choose to give stranger him or stranger her a hug; it’s as if they know, deep down, that this is the way it is supposed to be: no separation. In love with love. Successful Communism. Socialism without bureaucracy. Living without the need of survival. Gabba is the one reminder in the whole Rave movement that my imagined reality is nowhere in sight: nobody can keep up with 180-220bmp: this is the point of Gabba, it is the evidence of the ever-present logic of the German mind, logic indelibly etched even into the most anarchistic Berliners, German artists, from other places in the reunited republic: my drug-fueled delusions of grandeur that I am in the middle of an event which is specifically singular to this point in mankind’s history containing meaning that I understand at the core of creation interrupted by an aural hijack in the middle of the dance floor that speaks of nothing more than uninhibited, senseless, uncontrollable abandon surrounded by the most penetrating sensory experience available anywhere. This is the grandeur, that no-thing matches this extremeness in other places because it cannot; Berlin pushes always at the edge of the possible while the newly-liberated of the East discover there is somewhere new to me, to everyone in this 120-room building that was a shelter from its very inception, stands in the middle of Berlin City encompassing freedom which means free-from anything inhibitory. For a second I am at odds with whether to perpetuate my fall into hedonism or whether to call the cops to report on this crime in which I willingly participate, whereby calling the authorities on my own submission to the bottomlessness of oblivion. Each one here, upon reentering the world outside the bunker walls, will know a free-from previously unknown. I choose to pop another pill with Franck again his fingers push between my lips then teeth onto my tongue I taste the bitterness of the pill we swallow again then kiss. I reach my hand up Franck’s thin wet t-shirt his pale flesh clammy but warm, almost hot, I feel his right ribcage run my hand over his right pectoralis pinch together the tip of my thumb toward the tip of my index finger the two enclosing beyond the edge of his right nipple as I discover the piercing ring in him turning me on more, even more I crane my neck dive into the sweat of his neck enjoin my lips, tongue, teeth to him the smell of boy cigarette military concrete walls lacrid air ventilation which doesn’t exist of love of assault “widerspruchlich” I’ve found a man. “Franck, you are hot, you’re a hot man I like you!,” I say. “Man? I am just a boy,” he laughs. “But I’ll be a boy for you,” he says. “Let’s get out of here,” I say. “Yes! Yes let’s gehen, I cannot tolerate this place any longer,” he says. We move through bodies down the many concrete steps we had leapt up over out of der Bunker ask some German chick with purple stubble over her skull which way to FriederichStrasse Bahnhof dizzy, Franck stumbles with me off to where we know not. “Weimar Republic!” I shout upward to the overcast sky Franck’s hand in mine both of them sweaty, clammy, chemically-laden bone to skin. “It’s not!” says Franck. “We wish, oh yes! This is the city we try again to make right here, Weimar City you have to believe it.” Another wave of drug moves through us as if our molecules were programmed to feel the exact same feeling at the exact same time. Gently but firmly I bite his lower lip he grabs my pelvis pulls me into him again the saliva exchange signifying the intoxication of lust certifying we embrace abandon.

It is no longer night. Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof  glows dimly there is no train to take us away. Prenzlauer Alle seems a long way but it is not as we have each other at this place to the point at which I could believe we are under water. Franck is my temporary drugged-up salvation pushing one more pill between my lips he spits into my mouth to give my throat lubrication I swallow feeling the housing of the narcotic travel down to where fluids in my esophagus will quickly begin to dissolve the capsule releasing another welcome spring of chemicals. We sit at the bahnhof bench look at each others’ massive pupils that could take in the world this third pill I know from experiences before will come on very quickly, the entire Bahnhof falling away from us the tracks clatteringly suggestive that a train approaches we can do this, stand up to get up into the safety of public transport, off to my small flat in Wichertstrasse. I can feel the sex we are going to have surrounded in intoxication. We sit on thick orange plastic seats I see what appears to be a couple of workmen in brown britches who repair trains or perhaps are employed in a factory somewhere beyond Prenzlauer Berg these men look upon us conveying they understand why we’ve chosen to escape in this way. I look at Franck his head seems to expand then diminish in size while glowing transforming what would otherwise be the absolutely mundane to a priceless moment that cannot possibly come to an end. We reach Prenzlauer Allee making it to the vacuum doors opening at the exit stop at my street corner I have grown to love Wichertstrasse within reach but we are tired from no food also not enough water we will make it, especially when we get into my bed where we are naked fueled by the intense fire of lust on ecstasy. Food is pointless; sex is positively necessary. We are lost to life. I am a feather encased in a glass jar filled by blowing hot air the surface of my skin tightens then loosens followed by tiny pin pricks finally a medicinal scent permeates around my body; Franck is now naked under the sheet of my bed he smells of dish water my muscles begin to recalibrate to embrace him.

I cannot separate Berlin the bed Franck or the feeling that we are underwater. “We do one more,” he says. I knew not that he had more. “This time in the other end” he says reaching over to his jeans pulling out a tincture bottle then two more capsules from a small transparent plastic zip-bag. “You have a glass to blend it, also just some small water?” I had heard of this method in another city but never took it this way but am willing to try everything. I go to the tiny gray kitchen around the corner grab a lowball glass from the shelf turn on the faucet a couple seconds, return onto the bed on my knees hand him the glass. “I will help you,” he says. Franck splits open the capsule the chemical powder dropping into the water he mixes with the glass tube of the dropper. “Roll your legs over your head.” My ass sticks in the air my ankles at my ears Franck squeezes the black rubber bulb of the dropper to suck up liquid ecstasy inserts the glass end into my anus squeezes again releasing what will be my fourth or fifth in under five or so hours. “Now you get to do me,” he says. A tide rolls through my head, the waves come in recede reenter I breath deeply my ass is electric absorbing quickly into the walls below which is the most expeditious method of taking on one more dive into timelessness. Franck swaggers to the kitchen returns with water in the lowball hands me the other pill I pull apart the capsule powder dropping into water mix squeeze he rolls his legs over his head spreads his butt cheeks with each of his hands I see something puckering at me, aim for the entry point begin to feel myself pulsing between my legs insert the glass tube squeeze out liquid ecstasy into Franck’s anus I pull out he drops his legs his knees spreading wide he rolls his head back I fall atop of him a couple of hard dicks crisscross between us, again I kiss his neck. I suck on his neck tasting the remnant of our time in der Bunker smoky concrete laced by my endless turn-on the scent of fresh underarm sweat, which is more my tripping imagination elevating the very best of tension exhilarated anxious internal dissolution buoyed in an sense of love. But what love? “Fuck me,” he says. I go from half-hard to hard refocus through the milk over my eyes making out the gray starfish point aiming to the pink center pushing into his sweaty hole. I go slowly he reaches alongside my pelvis to my butt cheeks pulling me hard into him, he exhales gutturally scraping his vocal chords, “Ah Mann…. “ Spark alights around my cock absorbing anus drug-fuck connection through disconnection as I take his lips in my mouth pushing all the way in.

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St. Francis tamed a terrible wolf, 

only to discover that the human heart 

harbors darker desires than those of the beast.

“Franck,” I say, “I love this but I am hoping I can sober up. I feel like this life will kill me and I know I cannot bear the thought of it killing you. I would be completely destitute.” I feel myself desperate, but honest. “Oh man you know I am so fucked up but I truly do love you. I know you are like such a true fellow. Ach! Fellow is stupid. You are my lover I hope, my brother but a man I love. I think you have such honesty. I know I am druggie, but we have nothing in the DDR, no drugs ever, nothing; no Gabba, no Bunker, no life. Just gray tea in a black cup. I am happy today’s reality, high, happy, hardcore. Happy hardcore Franck with his man, Max. Mad Max and the Free Franck. Maybe we do one more e then think about getting away from this city to be sober in a new place, a new start, you say a ‘fresh start’ and I am completely agreeing with you. We can do this.” 

We have been excommunicated from all life outside the window that runs alongside my bed while the late morning sun finds its way into this now, our room in the deep. “Franck,” I say, drawing long the pronunciation. He laughs out his throat, his cachinnation bounding around the room, triumph of abandon. We’ve been in my flat long enough that it begins to seem devoid of energy; we are spent since we both came twice, inside of each other then next across our bellies: we are sticky. “We should leave” my head speaks out rolling off the side facing him. “Schall und Rauch for some beer,” I say, “but we should wash off.” Shall und Rauch, so many meanings: transient shadow, hollow words, smoke, mirrors–a kind of cradle to me though just a bistro-bar, a place where a sense of connection reassures me we have a place to go, Franck with me together.

A bathtub on rollers pulls out from under the kitchen sink that is a common mod con of the old East Berlin. We climb in the tub together, I turn on water that is cold through the sprayer head slowly becoming warm I hold it above Franck’s spent hair as the wet becomes him relaxing him into a smooth moment with me. I wet the chuck of soap spreading lather across his pectorals, which are graced with sparse strands of hair, now enveloped in clean cream from circular motions I make with my hand. His eyes closed, I run the chuck over his scalp. I know I could love this boy for a very long time. We together are my quantum foam allowing the rest of creation to flower in its own way. This is my desperation; even high I know this, am aware of my state of existence. Always recording my reality as well as unreality, I drift into Franck still deeper wondering why we ever will wake from this dimension of uncontrolled safety. 

Franck returns into his worn jeans I offer him a clean pair of Levis from my box of clothes he’s happy to put on my pants for his use. I hand him a red t-shirt some socks a pair of Calvin Klein boxer briefs that I lifted from the men’s department in the KDW department store of West Berlin. I dress myself also in Levis a light blue t-shirt the same underwear as Franck now wears. I pull on my black boots we leave for Schall und Rauch. Nearby in Prenzlauer Berg – P-Berg – Schoppenstube is the oldest gay bar surviving the Nazis. We set out for the new one, Schall und Rauch. We step out from my building the milky light of late morning roughly bathing us in veneer that is Old East Berlin. It’s Stahlheimer Strasse to Stargarder Strasse to Gleimstrasse. We go in. 

+

Foodless to this point, I decide we need ham sandwiches with a bowl of milchkaffe. We sit the waiter looks at us like the aliens we are takes our order disappears behind a navy blue curtain. “Ah Mensch, we have to eat this thing my stomach ist so echt wahnsinn.” Incredibly so–“Wahnsinn”: insanity, lunacy, mania. His face harried, seeming a little crusty, I look worse I am sure. “Situation normal, all is fucked-up!” I say, igniting uncontrollable laughter between the two of us we gnash our teeth. I make the executive decision coke would do miracles as I see Andy walk in polished, proud, British. The waiter reappears delivering the sandwiches with two bowls of milchkaffe “Franck, I’ll be right back” I wrap my grips around the bowl stand up greet Andy like we’re flat mates sit in one of two cane back chairs at a table for two at the far right edge of the table farthest from the service bar hand him a hundred Marks his slight-of-hand ease materializes the powder-filled transparent plastic zip-bag into the palm of my hand. “Salvation,” Andy says in the perfect English that only a Brit could speak. The milk quickly cools the milchkaffe I remain sitting with Andy finish the bowl of milky caffeine so as not to signal this moment as a nervous transaction. Berlin is liberal with drugs but Andy the Brit risks nothing preferring to live here over London intending not to return for a myriad of reasons. The milchkaffe is gone I stand return to the table with Franck he’s looking at the sandwich as if it’s going to eat him not the other way around. “Eat up sexy we’ve got work to do,” I say. We bite, chew, order beers, that’s better. Beer settles everything. I manage to get the sandwich down entirely Franck says “Enough. Beer is better now my stomach needs it.” At the right corner of my eye I catch Viktor, my ex from Switzerland with whom I moved to Berlin, dressed in his three-quarter-length black leather coat his black hair pale skin red lips confidence at once pierce my high. Eddy from New York stands with him, the one who makes me jealous, the one who would be a beautiful best friend. Eddy turns. “Mark,” he says, as if to signal to me that he is present with Viktor. “Hallo. Wie geht es bei dir?” Eddy uses the formal German of “how are you” to emphasize that he knows I am fucked-up beyond all recognition. “What’s happening?” Eddy says. I smile feeling my lips crack, Viktor turns methodically around like the Swiss gear that he is, with his eyes in love mixed with disgust, disgust that I’m with another boy disgust because he knows my new brother-lover sitting across from me is my copilot in sex-intoxication. Viktor longs to do drugs but it scares him to try any of them. Eddy leads the way to our table I introduce Franck to Eddy then Franck to Viktor. Franck looks up at Viktor with an expression that indicates Viktor’s posh poise makes Franck ill. “What are you guys doing?!” Viktor says, inflecting the word “doing” as if Franck is about to be arrested with me in tow as an accomplice. “Aren’t you supposed to be teaching?” he says to me. “Adventuring,” I say. “Yes, I’m sure. Adventuring. You look like an exquisite corpse,” he says to me explicitly. Viktor, not a witty boy, but recalling “exquisite corpse” in this particularly otherworldly context in the spacetime continuum resonates deeply in me, reminding me of a few short weeks ago when we lay on our bed in another part of the city as I described “exquisite corpse” in English after he had spoken with elegance of the concept in French. I was sure I looked corpse-like but soon, all would be well again. Seeing Viktor with Eddy makes me want the coke in a bad way. “We’re going to see a film,” Viktor says. “Tcheuss.” he says to Franck dismissively. I think fuck him, fucking entitled Swiss piece of shit I want to snort a fat line. I am guilty of my own crimes embracing reckless abandon far, far away from my home in the States. “Great to meet you Franck,” Eddy says authentically, politely extending his hand he shakes Franck, I mean, it really looks like Franck is shaking; they smile into each other it delights me I can imagine a bed full of these boys. Eddy says to me: “Be careful, Mark.” I think I am invincible even more so in his presence with Franck. “Take care of yourself my friend,” he says. I can think of one thing only I fucked Eddy and he fucked me just a couple days ago, like five hours before Tom’s Bar, and he knows me. He can see it’s more than drugs that drive my desires. 

Viktor is already out the door. Eddy turns also leaves through the door I see the two outside the huge picture window each speaking to each other’s faces. They stroll away, to the cinema. “Cinema!” I laugh, Franck starts to cackle, we destroy the Viktor-Eddy image of bourgeois complacency as our eyes begin to water squinting through our collapsing faces. We quickly wrap our grips around the pint glasses, down the beer. “It’s Coca-Cola time baby!” We leave. 

We stop back at my flat to do the coke in private. I bring an old serving tray made of tin from the kitchen to the main room where the bed sits, a table with two chairs only where we sit to take the next dose. A small East German flat that I had sublet from a Brazilian living in Berlin who returned to his home country for the summer whose name was Romeo, the place is beginning to feel like a drug cloister as an increasing sense of shame overtakes my sense of self worth, sense of respect for Romeo. I hand the zip-bag to Franck he dumps an amount the size of a silver dollar onto the tray produces his identification card carves out four clean long lines of what I know is about as pure as it gets in this city; the drug train which funnels narcotics to Berlin has been a well-devised underground network since the Weimar days up to the present–heroin, cocaine, tranquilizers–like now. 

I want to burn the flat now as I watch Franck roll up a Hundred Marks with which to snort the coke. Vanished are the two lines one up each nostril he looks up at me hands me the Hundred-Mark note I take it look deeply into his iris-less eyes tilt my head down angle the note from end-of-the-line powder up to my right nostril: One, Two, Three–snort the blow tilt the head look up pinch thumb toward index finger inward to the nose bone swallow taste powder quickly paralyzing my throat to total numb. Salvation. Position the note into left nostril: One, Two, Three–I can hear Andy back at Schall und Rauch, “Salvation!”–Louder this time, more numb now. I see Franck for all of his beauty. 

Der Bunker is the only place that will have us, the party inside the towering structure endless. We are safe here, up in this large room littered with bodies around its perimeter, a few skinny boys still gnashing off Gabba dance control at its center. We sit, we smoke. I get us bottles of beer from the bar. What the human body is capable of enduring seems endless, no consumption too great. The light of day cannot find any of us here der Bunker is pitch dark except for purple spotlights. The techno beats are faster still so to emphasize there is no letting up, this will go on. Journey into infinity we are embedded in the system. This is exactly Gabba; exactly what Gabba seeks to destroy. Coopt nothing. Worldwide Terror. Be all you can be means ego. Destroy is its opposite. Gabba is after the place, beyond both extremes, those two opposites. Success? What? Failure is not an option. Almighty–the feeling, but almighty is specifically not success. Oblivion. Stereotypes toward Gabba are exactly what it discounts. No uniforms. No dress code. Do I smoke out of one side of my face or both? No one cares here. Not in control. No code. But I don’t want to be here. “Franck!” I shout. “Wat man!” shouting back, the “W” an audible “V” from his voice, an English-German point of understanding to meaning, language affiliation index, “What” or “Wat in the world are we doing here?” I say. “Let’s go to Potsdam!” His eyes bug-out like he hit the jackpot, “Oh fucking cool man! Echt! Let’s fucking go to Potsdam!” It’s one way to sober up, to restore a sense of place. “Let me get rid of this, I need to sell this ecstasy to one of these guys here,” Franck says. I am dizzy but not surprised that he deals, but does that make him a drug dealer? It’s hard to say. It’s more money for the trip, the palace life outside der Bunker, the light of day.

+

[Potsdam Photo Insert]

Earlier, in winter, Viktor had taken me to Sanssouci Palace Potsdam. Then, the statues around the palace had all been encased in tall, sturdy, rectangular wooden boxes to protect them from the elements, the grounds of the palace silent except for the two of us marauding amongst the colonnades, sundials, low box hedging, dormant shrubs. He wanted to shoot photos in winter: we did, capturing the place at a time of stillness, desolation, lack of life. Sanssouci–the Prussian Versailles–temporary residence of Voltaire, summer palace of King Frederick the Great. I knew then that summertime would be a magnificent season in which to return to Potsdam, but I knew not the circumstances of which, or with whom, I would return to Sanssouci. 

It is the first time for Franck he’s filled with wonder at the site of Sanssouci in restored beauty far from its dilapidation under East Germany. The edges of my eyes are all I can feel, my eyeballs seem like they’re hollow, I thank God I’ve got sunglasses on. The scent of der Bunker hangs in my nostrils so I grab Franck by the neck pulling him into me, wrapping my arms around his torso, burying my face into his hair, deeply breathing in whatever he carries. “Man! Was ist mit dir los?” he says with abandoning love in his call. He turns, chases me a few feet, I trip, fall into the grass. Catching himself by bracing his arms on either side of my body, he slowly lowers down onto me his hands-palms flat on the ground. His full body weight now rests on me. Under a tree, we fall into deep sleep awake. 

When I awake to the breeze of dusk it is cool, the grounds around the palace vacant but in a satisfied way, as if the place had that day been respected, greeted with love, attention, living interest in this historic site by those come to be here on a summer Sunday; the property with its stately structures now available to all of the public, offering a place of clarity. Franck is deeply in slumber his chest rises then falls, I sense the chemicals leaving his system. I feel clear but haunted by post-intoxication, which carries always a heavy dose of melancholy. In another city, my American friend David would always say: “Payback’s a bitch.” Simple enough words, yet the actual feeling, der Gefuel, is scary, sinking, gets worse with time I’ve come to understand I am gripped in something dark teetering at the abyss’ edge. I am wondering: does my Franck also feel this. The skin on his face has acquired a semblance of healthful rosiness, I am wondering if I share such gentle beauty now. I go from reckless abandon to something next to pure, week after week. I am happy I am sad I am happy depression grips me, anxiety stronger with its destructive terror as my natural chemistry of wellbeing dissipates with every new ravage of deep intoxication.

+

I then realize that not only is Franck deeply in slumber, but I should be also. I shake him, because I want him to awake, then I kiss him four lips pressed upon one another then insert me tongue. He spits up and begins to laugh coming into instant awareness of the present. His still-shut eyes and happy-baby cheeks thrill me with love he opens his eyes wraps both strong arms around me and pulls me in close. I decide in my mind that I could be completely utterly stone-cold sober with this boy and remain in ecstasy for an eternity. “Franck!” I shout. “Man, Wat!?” he bear all his happy teeth. “I fucking love you!” I shout to the sky bracing my palms on each side of him, howling in the excitement of the acceptance I feel in this moment. “I fucking love you,” I shout to the clouds as if a wolf lost at the Palace of Potsdam. “I fucking love every piece of you Franck!” 

+

General Mohnke, aware that the Russians had already stormed the Charité, decided to give it a wide berth. The group could hear wild Sabine screams piercing the Berlin night. As one of the soldiers put it, “I had been in Russia, so I knew there were two sides to this ugly story, atrocity followed by counter-atrocity. Still, it is just not a pretty sight to see a terrified, naked woman running along a rooftop pursued by a half-dozen soldiers brandishing bayonets, then leaping five or six stories to certain death.        – The Bunker by James P. O’Donnell

+

Potsdam is a history of conciliation, the place of my personal surrender to having no control over my willingness to be whatever Franck wishes me to be: friend, lover, drug confidant, any one of these works for me.

I dream in the simplicity of the moment: it is in the mornings, when the air is wet, early birds call out to one another, pines greet the clouds which open to permit the sun in and so much else enters into the earth and its dominions, there is no reason to fret, no reason to worry that I am alive. In the northern parts of the world, this feeling seems even more true, and is. I have called out to many of the earth’s creatures on so many days it has left me wondering how I dare continue in the world of men. It is painful for me to be near humans, painful to continue in this sad and sick disease of the city, of commerce, of traffic. There must come a time soon when I venture to leave, when I launch to get away and leave it all behind. There hardly is a reason at all anymore why I remain in these odd places within the developed world, why I have trapped myself in so much and defined that somehow this is my reality. It is not my reality. It is the place I have been forced to be through circumstances of unreality. Family, this is the one reason I am here in this place that is the city. as the family calls me near and as their needs call out to me in some way to reveal that my presence is, in some way, needed, I have answered the call or answered myself and determined to live here for a time. It is two years now, in this city, near the family, and it is again time to make a large and significant change. I suddenly know that I am like Sabine, running from bayonets that I myself create every time I pursue my addiction.

“Franck?” I say. He awakes: “Max?” he says. “I must clean out my system immediately. I have to get out of Berlin to try a new approach to life.” He opens his eyes I see he is in total agreement, this time it’s total, like we’ve been on this path together for decades together already though it’s but five or so days, as I can think back only so far in the presnet. “Let’s leave Berlin for some days,” Franck says. “I say we go to Prague,” he says. “To Prague, in a city we know nothing. Do you know this place?” I tell him no. “I’ll go anywhere, the drug cycle of this city has fucked with me too long and I’m ready. I think I can get clean.” I say. “Besides,” I say, “I’d love to fuck you in a clear state of mind!” I say, knowing the devilishness of my words is necessary to stop this moment from being lost into the pointlessness of shame. 

  

Anxiety is my constant companion. Franck is not this emotion, he is love. Yes I am losing my mind, I have to leave Berlin for a cleanse; Franck decides to take me to Prague – Praha 8 – the family homeland for him before his parents moved to East Berlin to embrace German Communism. Failed Communism.

Viktor is called home to Zurich to accept his father’s appointment in the funeral business I am thankful I’ll not have to tread through his further psychological torment; he is threatened I hear from Eddy that if he does not return he will lose his inheritance. He resists, calling me to discuss how we can begin searching for a flat as he believes he has new employment at Treuhandanstaldt. We meet at the landfall favorite Schall und Rauch. 

He walks in: “For once you are on time and not making me wait.” He sits in the cane back chair opposite me, confrontational, or controlling or both. “I am trying to secure this position in administration at the Treuhand, then I can stay. Maybe we need to get a flat together again. What do you think?” His invitation is a knife slicing through my stomach and heart in a swirling figure eight. I am confused for I feel some kind of self-abandonment in my love for Franck, a sense of wild dangerous love raw full of twists and turns that keep me in rapt attention for his wicked beauty. Viktor, on the other hand, is a sense of establishment that my family has always encouraged me to follow but I have resisted, again and again from country to country. “If we get a flat together again, you’ll only hate me for my other lifestyle. I don’t blame you: I know I’m reckless but I can’t help it right now.” He sweeps his shiny black locks over the top of his head. “You are overt, you know.” His English can be stunningly direct; he says overt I recognize his countenance as the same stolid Swiss facade he’s always been able to maintain through conflict and error. “Overt in your habits, always more consumption. If we are together again I’ll help you, you don’t have to rely on these insane parties and, how do you say it in English, shattig.” He pauses like he actually needs help, wants help, with a simple word. “Shady,” I say. “Yes, and you are so shady too, when you are with this guy, it is Franck, his name, yes?” Viktor has a point but I’m not sure I can digest its meaning; I seek adventure while he represents safety but torture. “Viktor, you know you turn me on like a fucking substitute for everything I’ve been unable to achieve in my life, comfort, safety, steady income and I get it, you want that type of security. And our sex is some of the best; I rarely ever have sex sober but with you it’s great, like the time we went to Apollo Sauna and came five times each over a couple of hours. That holds a lot of weight in my mind of what makes a relationship hot. But everything else is on your terms: where we go out, what we buy in the market. You’re always critical of what I wear and you want me to look like your Swiss partner and I’m not, I’m a crazy American in Berlin a couple years after the fall of the Berlin Wall in the center of reunited Weimar and the creative energy is astonishing. I want to experience every aspect of Berlin. This will never happen again.”

“But you’re nine years older than me,” Viktor says. “When are you going to grow up?” There’s a force in his voice. “You act like you’re nineteen years old still, you have a teaching job whenever you want but you cancel your lessons to go to stupid places like der Bunker or Tom’s Bar. Drugs and sex, it’s all you care about and you’ll either overdose or catch a disease. There’s no point living like that when you should be focusing on your life. Stanford graduate.” 

“I see you’re point Viktor but I don’t know why you even care to live together again. You just want someone whom you can control and you’ve already done that to me. I want to be free right now and Franck may be my partner in crime but he’s kind, he has this amazing heart underneath all the beauty and tattoos.” He looks directly into my eyes like he has the power to shatter my skull by his next delivery. “Franck is the typical drug addict with no future; he looks good now but the drugs will turn his body to a corpse.” He likes his references to the corpse. “You’ll see, you stay with him you’re dead. No future.” I remind him: “Yes, like the Sex Pistols said, ‘No future for you…’ but you will leave me the second your father gives over the business and demands that you return to Kusnacht. With no thought of me further. You’ll leave me with the flat and a total lack of love. The question is not whether we should live together again, the question is why you still think you can control me.” 

Eddy enters with his friend Ursula and they walk over to us. Ursula is large like every Ursula I’ve ever met, nice big breasts deep red lipstick bleached long hair black leather jacket tight jeans black boots. She holds a cigarette in her left hand and her long manicured fingernails painted shiny white. Eddy extends his hand to me: “Hey Max. You’re looking well.” I have to believe him I really have no idea what I look like with nearly forty-eight hours away from the scene. “Are you still doing those Gabba parties?” Ursula blows smoke out her perched lips pulls back a cane back chair to sit. Eddy follows her lead. “I’m at der Bunker mainly on weekends,” I say. “But it gets pretty intense. Franck and I have been hanging out more at Tacheles, a little bit at E-Werk.” Eddy looks at Viktor wondering, I can see, what his motivations are. “Viktor and I went for the Mossimo fashion show. I love that club. That’s your favorite place when you go out, right Viktor?” Viktor joins in as if he’s chief critic of the Berlin scene. “E-Werk is a real club, not some bomb shelter for drug addicts.” I decide to drop a bomb myself. “Franck was a resident DJ at E-Werk last year. You’ve probably heard him spin. But he’s smart, he doesn’t hang out where he’s an attraction.” Eddy steps in before Viktor and I make a descent Sunday evening into a ball of tension. “I think we should all get together and maybe go to Schoppenstube. Something totally out of the ordinary, not House and not Gabba, just old queens sucking cocktails and dancing to classics and disco. That’s my style. What do you think Ursula?” Ursula pulls away her second cigarette from her lips and produces beautifully broken English. “I think it is time for the gays to have some nice times. Der Schoppenstube is perfect for the place, just some nice music smoking dancing maybe some cock in the back room. I am thinking I can even go to pick up some nice fat cock!” She puts the cigarette back between her lips, sucks it, pulls it out, blows. “I have much better luck with gays because no one sees the other one in these dark rooms.” Viktor is not pleased, the conversation between us did not go towards his direction. I on the other hand am relieved, I do not need to be pulled further into Viktor’s clever logic and criticism of my lifestyle. “Would you ladies like a drink?” Eddy says. He waves to the waiter who saunters to our table and shortly we drink, begin to further lose the intended plot of the evening.

+

You cannot wish upon a star that has already passed you in the night. We skip eating and by the time we finish another round of pints, we are clueless as to the time, and to the fact that Tacheles is about to close. Tacheles, the Berliner squat I love occupied by Anarchist artists in Mitte and I am gone mentally, I have not lost Franck it is so long ago it seems only twelve hours that we were in Potsdam. Where am I now, really? How did this come about? “Max,” Franck says, “it is time to, how do you say be sober, but we have one more big blast off: Lucifer’s Ball is tonight at der Bunker. This time the big Berliner Bomb Ecstasy!” He seems to mean sober up by underlining the Berliner Bomb. I wonder what he means but I have heard of this in anotehr city. The Ecstasy Bomb. “Are you saying what I think you are saying Franck? Injecting?” He looks at me sheepishly but then with a burst of excitement. “Yes!” I knew this actually my being resides in other people’s emotions of me so I give in freely exalt in the ultimate form of the drug, its potential. But I know my true self: I wonder if I am a true being or just a thought in this cosmos of insecurity that is me making no decisions but merely giving in. At least Franck is the brave one, making decisions.

This time we go to Franck’s flat – a large warehouse space with impossibly high rafters big windows. We make no ceremony of this. “We mix, we heat it up, we shoot it up. Then to the Lucifer’s Ball.” He seems intent on making this a no-nonsense experience. “I’m with you my brother,” I say. “Dive into the ultimate then out, like a dip in the pool.” “Dip?” he questions me, not knowing the word. “I do not know the German for it, but like when you jump, you jump into the pool. Then you get out. Same thing,” I say. “Ah! Oh Man griff into the pool.”

We for some reason stop by Alt Berlin, Germany’s oldest gay bar that survived the Nazis.

I am not sure what lies above but it is one or two or three more floors of the five-floor der Bunker Franck is bathed in red light everything tinged in hellfire red the innards of my system glow so that the organs of my body the liver the lungs the kidneys my bladder float suspended outside my body Franck has turned from the leopard I met the first night we tripped together to a statue of a Roman ghost with his tattoos the marks chiseled onto a body which remains perfect without any scars though we fight a drug war soldiers enlisted in the underground military of pleasure. “Wat the FUCK MAN!” he says. “I can’t feel any part of my body!” We enter a chill room bathed in more red, upon red. “Franck!” I say. “Man I have never…..”

MDMA was originally developed by scientists in order for Psychiatrists to use with their patients. MDMA was outlawed by the Federal Government in the 1970's because MDMA opened up people in their psychological traumas. The US Government did not want this kind of "love and acceptance" to be put into the hands of Psychiatrists to administer to their patients, because MDMA with its great benefits greatly lessened fear in the human psyche, and governments all over the world control through fear. This may sound like a conspiracy theory, but it is not; governments control through fear as you can readily see when you watch CNN. 

Psychiatrists found that their patients began to express deeply held trauma and to recognize PTSD after taking the then pharmaceutical-grade MDMA; MDMA or Ecstasy as it became know on the street, was originally called "The Love Drug" and when it was outlawed, the drug went underground, ultimately finding its way into the Rave Culture. This is where I discovered MDMA, as you now know. 

MDMA is now being reconsidered by psychiatrists and there is a movement to have MDMA re-legalized, therefore taking MDMA out of the hands of drug mafias. Please take the time to meditate on these truths; ask Belinda, and know that my work stands to help others. 

I’m suddenly in the future: somewhere in an old dented trash can on the corner is a sheath of speed tabs, diet pills, alarm clocks, bright eyes, wakey-wakeys, whatever you want to call them. “Never-Say-Die” is what I called them. These are the pills that block the sleep impulse and force the body to stay awake for long periods; weight loss is just the byproduct of this process of everything else being blocked. But what I thought would keep me awake turned out to be some kind of sleep aid, or perhaps somebody slipped me a Mickey in that last bucket of Whiskey Red Bull. Did I say “bucket?” Yes. For in Thailand, that is what you get when you intend to either drink a lot or at least to share with a group of friends, acquaintances, or gaggle of hookers. 

Those pills knocked me out so completely that when I woke up outside Club Lucifer, a small gang of, three of them in total, Ladyboys, mauled and prowled over me, upon my half-naked body. I knew nothing of anything. There seemed to be some kind of death waiting around the corner but I wasn’t sure because at that moment, the only thing apparent is that this was a land far away. All the Westerners in the world may visit Pat Pong but it will forever remain as mysterious as Thailand herself. The Ladyboys were another story altogether. 

“You sexy, you take us home.” 

“Fuck you,” I shrugged, shook off the concrete, and I broke away from their makeup and wigs, dicks in tight jeans, small fake tits meant for somebody else. 

There is a yearning for suicide within me, but for now I’m not about to let this death happen in any way so unspectacular where my family reads of my overdose, in the company of gay Thai boys, who dress up like girls in order to receive acceptance by their society and who disapprove of overt boy-on-boy sex. No, I’ll die all right, but let it be filled with light.

Suddenly, I am in my past. We sat at Max’s Opera Café on the edge of campus, and as he told me that there never would be a war again in Europe, I believed the professor. “To think that just fifty years ago World War II held most of Europe in conflict, and now just fifty years later war in Europe is unthinkable.” I believed him. I believed him because I was naïve, because I had no reason not to believe him, because he was a scholar of some achievement and I was not. The following year I enrolled in Serbo-Croatian language classes, held in a temporary trailer that served as our classroom while the buildings of the campus that were damaged by the earthquake of 1989 underwent repair and retrofittings. In that class I sat across from Egon Scotland and his wife Christine. Egon, a journalist with Germany’s Die Zeit, had enrolled in the class for the basic reason that I had, too: to prepare for a trip to Yugoslavia. By that summer I was there, in Zagreb, second capital of Yugoslavia, and the following autumn I visited Egon and Christine at their beautiful flat in Munich. A year and a half later, after the war in Croatia had swept across the republic’s entire stretch of its southeastern border, I sat in the bedroom of a mansion in Connecticut with Steven Skakel while he turned on VHS footage of war atrocities in Croatia. In that video I learned for the first time of Egon’s killing outside the town of Vukovar in Croatia’s far eastern region.

Betroffenheit. We are back in Germany: Munich is unique its character in the Lenbach Museum. The works of the artists in this museum come from many different countries but the artwork seems to reject this, instead revealing a message that all is bleeding into one. The Lenbach is a contemporary museum and it reflects Munich, a city which was devastated in the second world war and rebuilt to its modern state after allies freed the city. There is no evidence in Munich that Hitler waltzed in grand ballrooms and fed on Jew's flesh unless you really look at the modern buildings and ask yourself "why is this building or that building modern?" Then you realize that it is modern because everything around you was destroyed. And so the Lenbach Museum is a modern building where artists Franz Marc, Vasily Kandinsky and Alexei Yavlensky lead you through the modern century. However, their work does not report the crimes of this century; rather they convince through mood and paint that there was something more important happening than mass killings, something more important than horror and violence. There were some who tried to live through it all by continuing their lives undisturbed, undisturbed by means of isolation and the underground. It was the new renaissance that has been ongoing since the birth of Jean Cocteau, when Orpheus began his descent into the nether world. Continuing shows in cinema houses in isolated places like islands went on undisturbed, filled with people who went unnoticed as they proceed to do whatever it is they are born to do, and to be, never forgetting their responsibility to one another, to rely on one another, even today.

There were eight horses standing proud decorated with white ribbons of lace trimmings and crystal beads that hung and wrapped them round their bodies and across their bellies and between their hind quarters and winding through their tails and into the anus and the beads also hung from the crowns on their heads. There are four royal chariots standing motionless behind the horses, but the horses and the chariots are not attached to one another. These chariots are made of a rich, polished gold like you find in great Roman cathedrals, the gold that was mined by slaves and cast into elaborate designs by slaves who sometimes died from the forced labor. The gold chariots are amidst an haze of dense midnight-blue and the foreground is a common sidewalk-gray color, the same texture as a common sidewalk. Atop the chariots stand ridiculous men: in the first chariot on the far left stands Pilot in royal Roman garb and he is wearing headphones and holding a Walkman cassette player in his right hand; in the next chariot to Pilot's left stands Adolf Hitler dressed in his usual military uniform and in his right hand he is holding a McDonald's hamburger, half of it still wrapped in its McDonald's hamburger paper. He is just about to take a big bite of the hamburger. The third chariot stands empty and the only sure thing we know about the owner of it is that he is an American man from the south who believes that the Holocaust was a hoax. Standing in the chariot in place of the it's owner is a totem pole with three heads carved into it. At the top of the totem pole is the head of Sammy Davis Junior looking at you with his glistening eyes and thin lips that seem to be singing "The Candy Man," and below, the head of Leonard Bernstein looking relaxed and dignified, as though he has just finished conducting the symphony; and below Leonard is the head of Robert Mapplethorp with a cigarette between his lips. In the fourth chariot stands a statue of a young man with a shaved head in tight blue jeans, a white t shirt with the word FRONT painted in red letters in the middle of the shirt contrasts a black leather jacket with zippers and an arm band wrapped around the statue's upper right arm, a red band with a white circle and a swastika in the middle of it. The statue is holding a clinched fist and is shaking it at the horses. There are many naked boys swimming in circles in a pool that is transparent and suspended before the chariots. Most of the boys in the pool have blond hair and their bodies are all very pail, even though you know that there are African boys and Indian boys and Japanese boys and Eskimos and purple Nigerians and even boys from Tirana and Tiajuana. The constant swirling in the pool makes the water turn red because some of the boys are bleeding and the constant motion makes the water and blood mix until the entire pool is red and all you can see is the many sets of blue eyes looking at the next boy as the pail skin of the next boy comes closer and almost close enough to touch. There is so much blood at one point that screaming no longer happens, just summary executions and more pail bodies thrown into the pool. The horses are spotted with blood and the lace becomes now more decorated, delicate patterns with little red specks of blood, the crystal beads reflect light and glisten and now the horses begin to parade slowly in a circle around the swirling pool and slowly they march into a slow gallop, their broad necks and wispy miens all uniformly moving horizontally around, surrounding the pool. The slow gallop continues with just the sound of hooves until very young children in the foreground clap their hands, pulling their small hands from their fathers and clapping at the horses that are decorated in the blood of the boys. The fathers look down at their children and see their little heads covered by their little wool caps with the little tassels on top and they think how lucky is my son to be here with me witnessing the horrors of artists. The swirling pool grows deeper and the bleeding resumes, but those blue eyes remain undisturbed through pain and insult and final death, those eyes remain honest and faithful, never crossing and never letting the blood enter them. But then the blood in the swirling pool turns to fire and the horses begin to prance, the edges of the lace trimmings become scorched by the flames which lick their sides, the crystal beads glow from the orange flames. The children run toward the fire but their fathers only run a couple of steps to pull them back; the heat is so great they stop and scream for their sons who run right into the fire giggling and flashing their young white teeth, their little hands outstretched and reaching for the horses, "horsy, horsy." Their little tassels are first to catch fire, the boys in the swirling pool have developed blisters and the fathers look at them and turn away as if they could help them but refuse because they don't agree with the boys. The little children just keep running until they are running in the circle with the horses and the horses begin to trample them, their little bones are crushed while their fathers scream from the top of their lungs from the horror. The swirling pool turns into a dance and the boys have now reached each other to join hands, they smile and kiss one another on each cheek as their feet fan the flames, they rise above the fire and ascend to the clouds above. The children never escape the hooves that trample them, their fathers will never forgive them. The lace burns away and the crystal beads glow like coals from the flames, burning into the flesh of the horses but the horses do not understand what causes their pain. They blame the fathers who are watching the crystals burn, they have already forgotten their little children who lye dead. The statue turns to the empty chariot and whispers "When will you return, will you kill them all, will there be killing for me?" The totem pole quivers for a brief moment; Hitler has almost finished his McDonald's hamburger; Pilot is rewinding the tape. Finally the horses collapse into piles of ashes but the crystals continue to glow for a while, quite brightly in fact, the crystals glowing their fiery orange mixed in with the ashes. Next to this painting is a simple Indian from Brazil sitting cross-legged next to a straw hut. He is communicating as only Shamans do, reaching the animal and pure energy. He is a mediator between the arts and the public, a priest between spirit and man.

BEER. Again, the distant past seeps in: I get a call from mom at 6 a.m. so she can remind me to stop by to weed and water the garden while she’s out of town (she knows I’m already up, is free of ill intentions). She launches into how ripped up she feels. “It’s in the Trib this morning:  ‘….four million cans of beer every year, mostly to Indians.’” That’s a lot of beer sold to one single South Dakota tribe. “’Some try to trade tools, electronics and other items for beer,’” she continues. “It’s such a sad sign and I’m afraid it’s all just getting worse,” she says. “It makes me so sad.” She’s on it, heart-strong leader of no one aware of my interest in Indian problems though I do not speak of them. How does she do it? I thought how wonderful that not only had she not dropped that cake last Saturday afternoon, when her big dog growled and let out a thunderous bark as she closed the lower oven with her hip. But she hadn’t even flinched, lost her stride, didn’t reprimand the dog. “Focus,” I thought, an immovable center that let’s her glide from oven, past aggressive animal, to overcrowded kitchen countertop. It’s a vast landscape spread over this country, more accessible to me because this is my homeland. But I remind myself it’s not just an Indian problem, it’s the larger problem of alcohol and it’s the big question of addiction, in its many disguises. Ravaging family and foe, Firewater, Demon Alcohol, killing more than one of my tribe. Grandpa died at age 52 of a massive heart attack, eyes froze wide open, large hands clutching bedposts, mouth screaming at God for help or letting him know loudly that he knows it’s all over. I never met Grandpa; Mom found him that December day in his bedroom, where he’d been napping. She was just 13 then and had been playing her new seven-inch recording of Earth Angel by the fifties group The Penguins, on her new phonograph. She’s carried guilt with her throughout her life, “….for not hearing his screams over Earth Angel.” She’s aware of the guilt now, but multiple years of psychotherapy cannot take it away. Her call this morning was like a train swishing by outside my window. “We’re driving through the Pine Ridge Reservation on our way to the Black Hills,” mom adds. “I wish there was something I could do to help.” My mind lurched forth and I immediately linked up with her on the Indian article. It immediately made me think about the new Indian Cinema of the past ten years, of Indian recovery, at least what I know of it. It had seemed many tribes had tackled the problem. 

Sherman Alexie, author, filmmaker, member of the Spokane Tribe, spoke of it in his June 1999 film release Smoke Signals. The film features the poem "Forgiving Our Fathers," taken from a Dick Lourie collection called Ghost Radio. The morning call, an article telling of beer cans strew across Indian roads, of drunken driving fatalities – 14 of the 74 total Pine Ridge Indian deaths in 2005 – of a dead grandfather coming back to me in the morning to say, “Enjoy this time. Be here. Forgive your father, too.” I hadn’t thought of that. Dad, twenty-years the recovered alcoholic living on the edge of the Anoka Indian Reservation up north.  I hear a train whistle blowing, another man alone today and every day. 

BANARAS. India arrives or I arrive in India. Our time together began in a hotel lobby in Banaras where we three, along with twelve others, waited for the minibus to the Nepal border town of Sonali. As we stand here at the chai stall with the tea sitting in low clear tumblers, steaming sweetly and the banana peels pulling away so freely to produce ripe sugary fruit suited to the cinnamon and cardamom spices of the tea, Wolfgang looks now like the father to Andreas whereas in the hotel lobby he was a mere brother. 

Now Wolfgang sips his chai and sets it down on a shaky table. Ivan, the Pole, comes over and continues a half-workable conversation leftover from the bus. “I must just drink beer still,” he says. “I have been so sick it is this place Banaras,” he pronounces the city’s name with a sh sound, “it is such a sickening city.” Wolfgang shakes his head and reaches for the chai. “Now it is almost we are in Nepal, so I am drinking tea in Nepal but still beer now,” he grins ear to ear and chuckles through his beard, “to kill everything inside of me.” And this was probably right: the Indian beer will kill just about anything, so one is told, because there is the addition of formaldehyde in the beer to replace hops and grains that are not available for the fermentation process; this is for the intoxicating effect, the part of the drink which kills a little of you from the inside, obliterates the cells, dissolves you internally but not in a spiritual way but a chemical dissolving, like acid, giving the sensation of disconnection from the world ‘round about. 

BOYFRIEND. Franck resurfaces before me. Sweveral hundred miles away from a town called Hum on the Republic Square in the Croatian capital of Zagreb, stands a canary-yellow Habsburg structure that houses Confisurie Kras on its bottom floor, on the upper two floors several apartments now occupy what was once a single grand estate. This elegant building faces the main square of the city and in front of it passes the city tram, an assemblage of blue train cars with windows and seats and a bell that dings at every stop. Each weekday morning, Tomislav waits for the tram with a hoard of other Zagreb residents. In his gray coat and dark trousers and black boots, he blends in with the crowd. In his mind, in the minds of those that know him, he does not blend in but is quite spectacular. For in that elegant canary Habsburg building built by Austro-Hungarian Empire-commissioned architects, Tomislav calls it home. However, he does not live there and when his mother sold it after more than a century of family ownership and she moved to Hum, Tomislav, now in Zagreb again but on his own, still considers the old stately structure doma. There with his sisters and older brother and their mother, Tomislav and the others were born, even his mother was born there. It was not always a building of elegance on the main square. This building has a curious history. Anchored on each side by newer construction and a set of building less spectacular, on its left as you face it stands an insurance agency, on the right the Confisurie Kras, chocolate maker and retail trade shop, and with some apartments above. But Tomislav’s building, not always the antique on the main square that makes it the subject of snapshots of visitors and residents alike, holds a darker past, far darker than the canary-yellow and far more hidden than its collection of apartments within. This building was the Nazi headquarters for the Croatian Republic in World War II and in that time, Tomislav’s family lived there while Croatian generals duplicitous with Adolph Hitler’s regime in Germany occupied the apartments of the building, with Tomislav’s family sandwiched into a junior set of suites while the plans to extinguish Yugoslavia’s Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, and Partisani were drawn up on Tomislav’s family dining room banquet. There, during World War II, Tomislav’s family harbored Jews in the basement, in the very same building, while tank boots rumbled over the floor planks and plans of the Holocaust committed to ink and paper, then to the fields of war.                                                                                              

I awake from neither dream nor hallucination, but memory of my past and to my future, welded into a single time capsule. My dear friend Francois is about to arrive in Berlin; Franck and I leave, we try to leave for Prague. Franck beside me we are at the Berlin Alexanderplatz Fehrzeturm looking into each others’ eyes. He sees me I can feel him. There stands nearby an Andean music troupe playing the traditional ancient music that is their signature, the music that allows me to see how the world is changing how Berlin is changing the Wall, die Mauer, has fallen the sense of being American has almost fully left me, perhaps entirely left me at this point for my own volition to become something other with the combination of my consciousness constantly bombarded by the embrace of this constant, magnificent city I call Berlin. I know not whether it is Franck or Berlin so deeply ingrained in my being, but I sense they equally give me hope, strength, challenge to feel the pulse of existence to the depth of my being. I come to understand God is not some small creature crouching in the corner afraid of his creation. Viktor is long gone, rich as was as ever shall be. Eddy hopefully not hating the two of us both me, Franck, our enlivened attempt to inject life, which led to death. I can hate myself not. The Andean troupe blows upon their Pan Pipes, I wonder where the bamboo has come from, how the bamboo fares in this, the cold gray winter of my city. I decide I shall not hide any longer: the Andeans have left a tribal ground thousands of miles thousands of kilometers away from where all of us stand, under the Berlin Alexanderplatz Fehrnzeturm. How is this so? What incredible dynamo has enabled this great merging of cultures to enrapture together on this regular, mundane day. I think of the progress of man, I think of my man before me, Franck, who is here today yet tomorrow I have no indication. 

“Would you like a beer Max?” Franck asks me. “Yes,” I answer him. The Berliner Imbisse ready to serve us this cold drink in bottles. The bottle feels warmer in my left hand than the drizzled sky that descends, rises, surrounds. I am, in love. I am, in love. “Max?” he says. “Ich liebe dich,” he says. Inside my dark heart wishes to turn away to deny once again the possibility of light, so my light heart enters to let me stand here to confront my fear. I have but one wish now, in this moment: to offer him those easily-accessed words. Love an abused word I use twenty times a day to describe my approval of the mundane. It takes but half an instant to dive into the light channel within my heart to discover I own this ability to give him this simplicity. “I love you, Franck.” I do not begin to cry my light heart is overwhelmed by my willingness to let go.

Berlin is a mess the streets grimy I feel myself disgusting in the morning gloom enveloping the atmosphere of my life but most of all, this gloom in my heart. I am on to Schall und Rauch to meet Francois, my dearest oldest friend. I enter off the street of GleimStrasse for some reason this feels like the first time I have been on this street, knowing that Francois likely is already waiting for me inside I know I am at least an hour late, it is another Sunday morning where I have lost all orientation the 10am meeting time with Francois I can remember the evening before hangs on me like metal clothing, a sense of shame that I let Franck slip away in The Berghain, falling for my own weakness in this addicted compulsive insatiability as if invisible claws scrape at the last vestiges of my being. I take this one last step off Gleim enter my old standby Schall und Rauch I see him sitting there reading, I guess, International Herald Tribune, our favorite newspaper, drinking a frothy cappuccino, out favorite drink, calm, fair that I am late.

“Schoenen guten Tag, my dear friend Max,” he says, his eyes lit in the eternal forgiveness that has kept us together all these years. “You’ve probably had quite the fun-filled weekend!” he adds, while I touch the top of the cane back chair, pull it back so that I can sit to be in his presence. “Francois, you’ve no idea. I am in love and I let my lover fall from my embrace into the jaws of Hell. What can I do? I am at a loss for words, actions, direction. All is lost,” I say, catching my own already-spoken words as my utterance hangs in the air suspended between us. “Ah!” Francois interjects. “All is not lost my dear Max. You’ve simply passed through the gates of love versus infatuation and now confront the reality of your self, along with the choices availa ble to you. You are ready to face the potentiality of truth. Clarity will come to you once you’ve found true love.” I look into Francois’s eyes and my heart feels like a stone.

“Max!” I hear, a voice familiar to me now but it is not Francois. Again: “Max!” I turn and as the door behind my man slowly shuts as his stride quickens in my direction. “Max!” and I am broken-open, all in this moment. “I am here!” Franck glistens in this moment of honor for me, having been given another chance to choose love. “I thought that I had lost you Max!” And I, thought I never would find him again. 

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