“Just like you. You still haven’t told me the story of how your father squandered all the family money.”
“Maybe I never will.”
“So how much do you want per month?”
“One thousand deutsche marks.”
“That’s a lot more than my apartment in New York . . .”
“But this is a virtually self-contained apartment . . .”
“. . . in a less than savory corner of Berlin, where I know I could rent a studio for three hundred. Which is what I am prepared to pay for this place. Inclusive of heat.”
“No can do.”
“Nice meeting you then.”
I turned and headed toward the stairs.
“Five hundred,” he said.
“Three-fifty. Final offer.”
“Four hundred twenty-five.”
“I’m not budging on this. But thanks for an entertaining cup of tea.”
“You truly
are
a New York cunt, aren’t you?”
“By which you mean . . . ?”
“Money grubbing.”
Is that a synonym for “Jewish”?
I wondered but decided to say nothing. Except: “You know something, chum . . . I really don’t like your tone.”
“Three-fifty then,” he said, the hint of desperation coming out again.
I held out my hand. He took it.
“We have a deal?” I asked.
“I suppose so. One thing: I’d also like a month’s deposit, just in case . . .”
“Do you own this place?”
He coughed out a lung full of smoke.
“Me Own Anything?” he said, giving emphasis to every word. “What an extraordinary idea. I have a very unpleasant Turkish landlord—a real Mister Big, with gold chains and minions and a very black Mercedes in which he cruises the streets of Kreuzberg. He despises me. The feeling is mutual. But I’ve had this place for three years, and he let me renovate it in exchange for a reduced rent. But now that it is much improved over the dump I first obtained from him . . . naturally, he has increased the rent by four hundred a month.”
“Hence the need for a roommate.”
“I’m afraid so. And don’t take this the wrong way—but how I loathe the idea of having you upstairs. Not that you’re bad news. It’s just, I really don’t want the company.”
Fitzsimons-Ross evidently had this need to play the one-upmanship card at every possibility. I knew from the outset that my relationship with this gent would be less than easy. But like Kreuzberg itself, I sensed that his disquietude—and the need to compete with me on everything—might just prove bracing.
“Hey, you want to be alone,” I said, “you can play Greta Garbo if you fucking want.”
This time I did walk down the stairs.
“All right, all right,” he shouted after me. “I’ll shut my bloody mouth.”
“I’ll be back in a few hours with some cash,” I said.
“Can you pay me the deposit and one month up front?”
“I suppose so. Will you be here at six?”
“If you’re coming back with cash, absolutely.”
I showed up at six fifteen—having returned to the Pension Weisse and collected a handful of traveler’s checks from my suitcase, then cashed them all in a nearby bank. After spending some time in a café, writing all that had transpired earlier with my roommate-to-be, I took the U-Bahn back to Kreuzberg. Fitzsimons-Ross had given me the front door code before I left. So this time I didn’t ring the front doorbell. When I reached the door to his apartment I heard Miles Davis from his “cool” period (“Someday My Prince Will Come”) blaring on the hi-fi. So much for his assurances that loudness was not his style. I banged once on the door. It swung open. I stepped inside.
“Hello?” I shouted.
No reply. I walked toward the studio area. Still no sign of him. Then I glanced in the direction of his bedroom. The door was wide open here—and the sight that filled my field of vision caused me to take a sharp intake of breath. For there, on the bed, was Fitzsimons-Ross. He was bare-chested, with a thick rubber tourniquet encircling his upper left bicep. A needle was sticking out of the bulging vein in the crook of that same arm. Though his voice was otherworldly, it still had a strange cogent clarity to it.
“You bring the rent money?”
Why didn’t I turn and walk out right then and there?
Because I knew I had to see how this would all play out. And because I was already thinking:
it’s all material
.
“Yes,” I said, “I brought it.”
“Just put it on the kitchen table. And if you wouldn’t mind putting the kettle on . . . I could use a cup of tea.”
“No problem,” I said.
Fitzsimons-Ross looked up at me with eyes that, though glassy from the narcotic hit, still shone with arctic-blue incandescence.
“Don’t forget: the tea needs to be steeped for a good four minutes,” he added.
“Fine,” I said.
I turned away from the man with the needle in his arm, thinking:
Welcome to my new home.
FOUR
I
AM A RATHER
fastidious junkie,” Fitzsimons-Ross told me.
I made him his cup of tea, which he drank silently. Then I proffered the seven hundred deutsche marks. He reached into his pocket and fished out a metal object that he placed on the table, then slid toward me.
“Here’s a key,” he said. “Move in whenever.”
“I thought I’d come by tomorrow with my stuff, then move in on Friday.”
“Whatever works. Don’t worry about any of this. I’ve got it all very regulated. Very under control.”
I said nothing. But I did notice how he was working very hard at being lucid right now, despite having mainlined what I presumed to be a significant amount of smack. This, I came to discover, was the strange, infernal duality of Alaistair Fitzsimons-Ross. It didn’t matter that I had walked in on his shooting up. It didn’t matter if he called me a cunt or made some less-than-vaguely anti-Semitic comment (as he was prone to do). It didn’t matter if he had woken up next to some Kurdish rough trade he’d picked up in the toilets near the Hauptbahnhof. Appearances had to be maintained. He was always determined to see himself in the best possible light—even though, as I also came to discover, the hardened, foulmouthed veneer with which he cocooned himself was easily permeated.
But all that was future knowledge. For the moment I had that strange heady thrill that comes with tossing yourself into a situation that you know to be, at best, dangerous. Writers—as somebody once noted—are always selling somebody out. I knew I had struck pay dirt the moment I’d spent five minutes with Alaistair. I had my opening chapters, and could only hope that the shooting-up episode was the start of many a low-life moment to be witnessed chez Fitzsimons-Ross.
So the next morning I gave notice at the Pension Weisse. Then I went to KaDeWe—the big department store on the Kurfürstendamm—and bought two sets of white sheets and equally white towels and a desk lamp and a basic set of plates and cutlery and a kettle and a coffee maker. I loaded it all up into a taxi and gave the address on Mariannenstrasse and hauled everything up the three flights of stairs to the atelier. Fitzsimons-Ross was nowhere to be seen. I unpacked my bags and made up my bed. Afterward I adjourned to the café nearest to Mariannenstrasse 5—the Istanbul—for lunch.
The Istanbul was run by a diminutive chain smoking man with a perpetual hack cough named Omar (he finally introduced himself around a month after I starting using his place as my outer office). It was a dump. A very basic zinc bar. Cheaply laminated tables and chairs. Cheap liquor decorating the bar. There were yellowing travel posters featuring scenic views of the Blue Mosque, the Bosporus, Topkapi Palace, and other Istanbul highlights. The cassette player by the till always seemed to be quietly playing some dirge sung by a Turkish woman about (I imagined) the swarthy Lothario who’d ditched her. But I immediately took to the place largely because—bar the low hum of the music and the whispered conversation of the middle-aged men who always seemed to be huddled at a rear table, plotting the downfall of some enemy—the place was ever-calm. More tellingly Omar came to know me as an habitué. Even when I told him my name he seemed to ignore this piece of information and continued to refer to me as
Schriftsteller
. Writer. He also started to lower the music whenever I came in, and seemed to approve of the two hours I would spend every afternoon at a corner table, writing in my notebook, getting everything that had transpired in the past twenty-four hours down on paper. Trying to write it all while the details were still bouncing around the inside of my head.
I would end up living much of the time in the Istanbul. Courtesy of my age back then, I didn’t have to concern myself with such pedestrian matters as diet or weight gain or the damage I was doing to my cardiovascular system with the cigarettes that seemed such an essential component of the writing process. The Istanbul had a cheap and cheerful food menu. The “we cook everything” staples it served (spaghetti Bolognese and carbonara, lamb kebabs, stuffed vine leaves, Wiener schnitzel, kofti, assorted pizzas, and even that most Greek of dishes, moussaka) had two essential qualities: (1) they were always, at worst, edible, especially when washed down with two half-liters of Hefeweizen beers and a Turkish coffee to follow; (2) the meal would never cost me more than six deutsche marks. As I hated to cook back then—and even now, as a middle-aged man on my own, prefer not to expend a great amount of time in the preparation of something to eat (maybe I’ve just never fallen in love with the so-called poetry of food)—the Istanbul was an ideal refuge for me.
On that first early afternoon—as I settled myself down for a plate of pasta at what was to become my corner table—I surveyed the small confines of the café: the coughing, diminutive proprietor behind the bar; the elderly man, his face expressionless, who sat at a table in the window, smoking, staring blankly ahead at the street; the sweaty behemoth with a beer belly the size of a bowling ball who was currently drinking shots of raki, his face awash in tears, singing an aria of woe to the impervious barkeep. I smoked three cigarettes, and scribbled away about discovering Fitzsimons-Ross with the needle in his arm, then recording this scene around me in the Istanbul, and thinking: so many residents of Berlin were refugees—if not from totalitarian regimes or impoverished countries, then from lives they wanted to flee, or things that trapped them elsewhere, or even, quite simply, themselves. It took work to land yourself in Berlin. Once you were here you were geographically boxed in. Even though residing in the western sector gave you the right to travel, it meant taking a train that went nonstop through the German Democratic Republic. Otherwise the only other option was a plane west. That was, I sensed, the inherent contradiction of life here. West Berlin stood as an island of individual and political freedom amidst a landscape of dictatorship. The city afforded those who came here a degree of personal latitude and flexible morality. It allowed you to construct whatever variation on life you wanted within its confines. But “confines” was the operative word. For you found yourself boxed in by geopolitical realities and a barrier that could not be breached. As such, you were free and caught at the same time.
I went to the small Spar supermarket located near the Kottbusser Tor U-Bahn station and bought some basics: cereal, milk, orange juice, and coffee and sugar, a selection of cold meats and two loaves of pumpernickel bread and mustard, two bottles of Polish vodka (cheap) and a half-dozen bottles of Hefeweizen beer (I actually wrote this entire shopping list down in one of my notebooks, as I was that obsessed back then with recording every detail). Later that night, as I climbed into bed for my first-night sleep at the apartment and began to doze off, I had an interesting wake-up call. Loud driving orchestral music, with a gypsy edge to it, blaring from downstairs. It was so full-volume, so deliberately deafening, that I couldn’t help but think (once I had cast off middle-of-the-night sleepiness): he’s doing this to test me, to show me who’s boss around here. I sat on the edge of my bed, rubbing sleep from my eyes, trying to think about my next move. I grabbed my robe and put it on over my T-shirt and pajama bottoms, then took a deep steadying breath and headed downstairs.
Fitzsimons-Ross was standing in the studio area, dressed in a paint-splattered T-shirt and jeans, bare paint-splattered feet, a cigarette sticking out of his mouth, applying an azure-blue paint with hyper-rapid brushstrokes to an otherwise empty canvas. The effect was like watching a brilliant Greek sky being created in front of you—and I was mesmerized by his bravura technique, the assertive skill with which he wielded his brush, the force of his evident concentration. Part of me was furious at being awoken by this blast of music—and wanted to play the prickly lodger, ready to take on my equally prickly landlord. But the other part of me—the writer who knew those moments when a creative reverie suddenly subsumed the world outside of me—knew that to interrupt the flow of his work now by ripping the tone arm off the record would be nothing short of monstrous. So I simply retreated back to my room, leaving in such a stealthy manner that he was never aware of my nearby presence. Once upstairs I did what I always did when sleep eluded me: I worked. Opening up my notebook, I sat down on the hard bentwood chair by my desk, uncapped my fountain pen, and started to write. I checked my watch. It was 2:15 a.m. The orchestral music (was it Bartók?) ended and was replaced by Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter and then John Coltrane’s
A Love Supreme,
that long dark journey into the spiritual blur. Whatever I felt about this middle-of-the-night roar, I had to concede that Fitzsimons-Ross’s musical taste was high-end.
The music abruptly stopped at four. There was a long silence, during which I put down my pen, rolled up another cigarette, plugged it in my mouth, grabbed the half-full bottle of wine and two glasses, and went downstairs. But when I reached the studio area, Fitzsimons-Ross was otherwise engaged, as he was seated on the sofa, an elastic tourniquet around his upper arm, a needle sticking out of his bulging vein. He was just depressing the plunger as I came into view.
“The fuck do you want?” he said in a hoarse, extraworldly voice. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”
I retreated upstairs, smoked my cigarette, drank a glass of wine, then fell into bed. When I woke it was eleven in the morning—and from downstairs came the loud telltale grunts and moans. Drifting into consciousness it took me a few befuddled moments to realize that I was listening to two men having sex. As wake-up calls go, this was a first-of-a-kind for me. After a minute or so of this graphic sexual soundtrack, I reached over and turned on my radio, spinning the dial until I found a rock station. I blared The Clash as I got up and made coffee and smoked two pre-breakfast roll-ups and thought: today is the day I contact Radio Liberty and tomorrow is the day I cross over to nose around East Berlin.
After I had finished breakfast and washed up the dishes, I snapped off the radio and was relieved to hear that the performance downstairs had also ended. Grabbing my parka and scarf, I scooped up my notebook and pen and tobacco and ventured out.
When I reached Alaistair’s studio area I started heading directly toward the door. But I was stopped by a voice saying:
“So be a rude little fuck and don’t say good morning.”
I turned around and saw Fitzsimons-Ross sitting at his long kitchen table, sipping coffee and smoking a Gauloises with a thin, olive-skinned man who I guessed was in his late twenties. He had close-cropped hair, a small earring in his left earlobe, and a gold wedding band on his left index finger. He was dressed in a light brown distressed leather jacket trimmed with white fur—the sort of jacket I always associated with low-level thugs. Naturally I wanted to know everything about him, given that he had just been sharing a man’s bed and was also wearing a symbol that informed the world:
I’m a married man.
I saw him as another component of the ever-expanding narrative of my time in Berlin, and wondered what sort of involvement or arrangement he had with my landlord.
“Good morning,” I said.
“The cunt speaks.” Then, switching into impressively fluent German, Fitzsimons-Ross told his companion:
“He’s American, he’s my lodger, but he’s not really that odious.”
In German “odious” is
abstossend
. Fitzsimons-Ross spat that word out with such relish that his friend seemed to almost flinch as the word landed in his ears.
“This is Mehmet,” he continued on in German. “Say hello to Thomas.”
A quick “
morgen
” from Mehmet, then he stood up and said:
“I must go.”
“Really? So soon?” Fitzsimons-Ross asked.
“You know I start work at one.”
“See you in two days then?”
Mehmet simply nodded. Then, still not making eye contact with me, he gathered up his coat and walked quickly out the front door. When it closed behind him, Fitzsimons-Ross asked:
“Tea? There’s still a cup left in the pot.”
I accepted the offer and sat down in the chair that Mehmet had vacated.
“I sense you surprised the poor boy,” Fitzsimons-Ross said. “As you may have noted . . .”
“He’s married . . .”
“My, my, you are the observant one.”
“A wedding ring is a wedding ring.”
“And these poor Turkish boys, they have families who essentially map out their lives for them from the moment they emerge into the world. Mehmet’s wife is his second cousin—and a most plump girl. Mehmet told me he knew he liked boys from the age of fifteen onward—but imagine if he had admitted such a thing to his father. Especially as he works for his father at the laundry the old man runs right off Heinrich Heine Strasse . . .”
“Am I right to presume that you
didn’t
meet Mehmet there?”
“My, my, Tommy Boy, your deductive reasoning is so impressive. No, I met Mehmet in far more romantic circumstances . . . in the toilets at Zoo Station, which is a well-known pick-up spot for those of us who practice ‘the love that dare not speak its name.’”
“So you know your Oscar Wilde.”
“I’m an Irish Protestant shirt lifter. Of course, I know my fucking Oscar Wilde. Did we wake you up this morning, Mehmet and me?”
“Actually you did.”