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Volume CXXXIII, Number 17 |
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Beyond the Pines: All the very lonely people
LUDWIG RANG
COLUMNIST
Berlin in winter is pretty miserable, but without the stimulating
presence of the Living Theater, it was deadly. To save money, I moved
into a small room at the back of Madame Shéira's with a narrow
bed that I shared now and then with Wolfgang, proving to be just a miserable.
Once he cut my hair, which had grown to be pretty long,
leaving hairs all over the sheets and carpets. It was the only time Madame,
otherwise amazingly tolerant, got annoyed with me. But I had a feeling
she liked me.
I even introduced her to my father, on a visit to Berlin. Going for a
nostalgic stroll down the Ku-damm with him he showed me a bookshop in
which he'd trained as a young man at the beginning of the 1920s, while
he was for the first time, yet only briefly, married.
"What happened, Dad," I said. They'd divorced,
he told me, because she'd made "impossible physical demands"
on him. In other words, she was a bit of a nymphomaniac.
I should have been so lucky.
Two pieces of music I incessantly listened to that winter
summed up my state of mind: "All The Lonely People" by the Beatles,
one of the most depressing songs they ever recorded, and the famous adagio
by Albinoni, hauntingly beautiful yet just as depressing, with a hypnotizing
effect.
At the height of my feeling lonely and dispirited, a letter
from Ronald came. He was staying at the YMCA in Hollywood, hoping to get
work as an extra, but getting bored with the eternal sunshine.
In fact, he was thinking of going back to New York. Someone
had offered him a "pad" on the Lower East Side, hastily vacated
by a draft dodger having taken himself off to Canada. Would I be interested
in sharing it with him? Naturally, he was broke as usual.
However there was first-grade Mexican grass to be had on
the West Coast, and if he bought enough, he could set himself up as a
small-time dealer.
Despite my finances running low too I sent Ron $500 via international
money order, one of the most foolish things I've ever done.
With it Ron acquired a pile of pot, made a down payment
on our future pad, and bought himself a one-way ticket per Greyhound to
New York. The dope, in small plastic bags, he stashed away in the bottom
of his old army locker, routinely checked in as baggage.
Imagine what fun sniffer dogs would have had with that.
At the beginning of March, I booked a flight on Loftleidir
(Icelandic Airlines) from Luxemburg to New York, via Reykjavik. Due to
the use of propeller-driven aircraft, and low airport taxes at Luxemburg,
in the middle of nowhere, their transatlantic fares were incredibly cheap.
The only drawback was the time it took to cross the Atlantic,
including a stop-over in Reykjavik. And getting to Luxemburg. The cheapest
if not quickest way was by bus from Frankfurt.
Before leaving Berlin, I went to Bonn to attend the wedding
of one of my brothers. Not having had a haircut for weeks, and wearing
a shapeless Hirtenmantel, or Greek shepherd's coat, wrapped loosely round
the wearer like a blanket, I must have looked a sight.
But my family also detected signs of absent-mindedness and
general disorientation that naturally alarmed them. They rightly put this
down to my smoking habit. Actually, I was smoking less since gradually
running out of stuff, and wouldn't have known whom to approach to get
more.
I smoked my last joint in the toilet at Reykjavik Airport.
From JFK, I took a bus to the East Side Air Terminal, and,
from there, a taxi down to the Lower East Side. Getting out at the corner
of 8th and Avenue D (close by the East River) I happened to see a hippie-type
dressed in white, loose-fitting garments, flowers in his hair, emerging
from the entrance of a derelict brownstone. It was Ronald.
Our pad was four floors up. One entered the kitchen first.
Piled high with bits of furniture and bricks, it looked like a store room
or dump. He was stripping the walls in the living room Ron explained.
There was only one piece of furniture in this, placed in he middle of
the bare floor like a house altar, and that was his trunk.
Squatting by it on the floor Ron rolled a joint, lit it,
took a few hasty drags, and passed it to me. However, after having traveled
thousands of miles, within minutes, I was back where I'd started from-in
a haze of my own.
The next day one of Ron's "customers" dropped
by. With shoulder-length hair and scraggly beard, he was in his mid-twenties.
Though perhaps looking older, he looked like a hippie to me.
Back in the States, he was organizing trips to Havana, via
East Berlin's Schoenefeld Airport, for Americans were not allowed to go
there directly because of a State Department ban on travel to Cuba.
Perhaps, it occurred to me, Ron had stripped the walls and
removed all the furniture from the room so it couldn't be bugged.
Welcome back to Fortress America!