Index

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter One     - Page 5

Chapter Two     - Page 10

Chapter Three   - Page 15

Chapter Four     - Page 22

Chapter Five      - Page 26

Chapter Six        - Page 31

Chapter Seven    - Page 36

Chapter Eight     - Page 39

Chapter Nine      - Page 44

Chapter Ten      -  Page  49

Chapter Eleven   - Page 55

Chapter Twelve  - Page 58

Chapter Thirteen - Page 62

Chapter Foudteen- Page 67

Chapter One - Getting Bombed in Berlin

 

Chapter One

The explosion shook the entire block fueling fear, panic and stress on the strasse. The impact was nearby. Too close for comfort  as it managed to blow Michael and Sibyll from the bed they shared, launched in a manner that would qualify them as human cannonballs in the carnival of Professor Sardonicus, if there were such a person, and if there were such a carnival .

 

Michael was in the arms of a hypnotic dreamy mist and fog of a deep slumber sleep in the second floor apartment while dreaming of chasing Jehovah Witnesses with a silver crucifix and a wooden stake! Only holy roller speak in tongues vampires ring neighborhood doorbells furiously in our dreams to preach the Watchtower gospel to we infidels. In the dream he managed to chase them down in a laundromat frequented by circus people of dubious nature who sat in rows shooting up drugs while watching midgets in the washing machines have sex during the spin cycle.

 

Sibyll too awakened startled and confused. “The blast came from downstairs! What the hell?”she screamed in broken English with a Kathleen Turner growl   

 

Downstairs, below the apartment was the Die Berliner Galerie für industrielle Punk-Kunst or The Berlin Gallery of Industrial Punk Art. The enclave Michael and Sibyll opened up to display a compost pile  of left wing art, artisans, activists, and anarchists that not only were the West Berlin police watching carefully, also had drawn the ire and unwanted attention of the plethora of post war neo nazi thugs who embraced the the old post Weimar Republic  fascism to such a degree, they’d send Groucho Marx off to Auschwitz thinking he was Karl Marx’s brother.

This was 1965….Berlin was divided into East and West, an unlikely pair of twin, more a Yin and Yang couple...Germany was divided  and cut up like a geopolitical pizza with anchovies and double cheese by the victorious Allied Powers. The US, France, Great Britain and those madcap fun loving vulgar vodka Volga loving Soviets. The spawn of Stalin. The Mother Fuckers of the Motherland. The Iron Men behind the Iron Curtain. “Yes, Wink, I’d like to choose door number one, please.” Drumroll, the curtain opens….”CONGRADULATIONS! You chose the Iron Curtain. You now are the proud owner of a cinder block apartment in Siberia at a work camp!  While there working on the railroad, you and your family will enjoy your new car!!! The all new Czar Nicholas Tolstoy Tesla! All compliments of the Soviet Secret Police!!”

 

Michael, an American was a writer who was as American as ribbed condoms. Originally from New York  he had met the German artist Sibyll in America during a gallery showing of her artworks that she augmented and layered with a sultry performance  of poetry and music in a one woman show that raised the eyebrows of the high brows of Park Avenue. Not surprising for a group of Wall Street weirdos who engaged in hunting down trophy wives when confronted with an art performance called “Menstruation: The Breakfast of Champions”

 

They met, they dated, they conquered each other. Two years later Michael had traded in his NYC  greenwich Village bagels and pizza passions for Berlin’s beer barrel polka and bratwurst, moving  to West Berlin to collaborate with Sibyll on a mutual dream. To open a gallery for artists of all stripes, one act plays, music geared to an anti-war sentiment, no nukes, drug legalization. feminism, human rights, civil rights, gay and lesbian rights, ban the bomb, burn the bra  .. all the usual fuel the would inflame the right wing to light a fuse...as they did this early 4 AM West Berlin morning.

 

The acrid smell of smoke permeated the apartment. Michael and Sibyll both made a mad dash to the stairwell to see what damage had been done to the gallery forgetting that both always slept in the nude and had forgotten to put on a stitch of clothing and would freak out any frauleins that had a phobia of all things public and pubic.

The art event that just opened two days ago and probably  set of a psychotic episode of skinhead emotions was the recently installed “Hot To Trotsky” event that featured the artwork of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera , and a three person one act musical play that depicted the love affair of Frida and Leon Trotsky while living in Diego’ house.

 

The gallery was not too badly damaged. The large window display facing the street was a shambles of glass and metal and the stage area was a dystopian portrait of torn curtains, and most notably was the damage to  the four 16 by 20 posters of Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky. Shrapnel had taken out Frida’s eye and knocked a tooth or two out, while Diego ended up missing his head. As for Leon Trotsky...he was appropriately castrated and now blind!

 

Fortunately the reading room and periodical store was unscathed. Chairman Mao’s row of Little Red Books with the sign above reading “Better Read than Dead!” was still standing. Karl Mark’s

“Manifesto” still manifested in one piece and the Joe Hill Labor Song Books stood strongly by the   side of old Woody Guthrie ‘78’s.

 

“Well, Sibyll. This is a mess. Second attack this year.”

 

Sibyll had a warm tear running down her cheek torrential  as the snow melt in Bavaria, but her smile would melt a glacier. “We continue. We don’t stop. We stop, the win. I’ll call the others and we can clean up and be ready to continue the Hot to Trotsky show.”

 

“We also need to think about hiring some muscle to skin these skinheads!” Michael interjected.

 

They both agreed and without another thought decided to go out for breakfast and then take photos and 8mm movies of the construction of the Berlin Wall. Concertina wire, concrete and armed guards. The other side of the old school Soviet lifestyle the young new leftists were determined to bring down...a new dawn if you will.

 

Sibyll ran upstairs grabbed her camera and raced back down to the Gallery. “Ready?” she asked.

 

Michael nodded and together they walked out into the now 5 AM morning heading out the back door for the small 24 hour cafe down the street before the police arrived to take down their report.

 

“We forgot one thing, Sibyll. Our clothes!”

 

She shrugged and hand in hand they walked down the alley naked as two strippers causing stares and gasps from the half awake winos and junkies who thought they were witness to an alien invasion of nudists from space.

 

No shoes, no shirt, no service...except in the art district of West Berlin!

Chapter Two - The Luftwaffle House of Pancakes

Chapter Two
We enjoyed our au natural  breakfast at the small dark alley cafe, owned and operated by a former Luftwaffe officer.  He opened up after the war and named it the Luftwaffle House that not only served Blitzkrieg Blintz and a stack of monster Panzer pancakes, but featured  an annual Hermann Goering look-a-like contest that attracted every weirdo from Bavaria to Berlin.

We returned to our apartment and got dressed, nudity at that time of the morning in that alley and at that cafe were perfectly acceptable. Even the cooks looked at us with a smirk...we only frequented early morning and late night "Nude" establishments. Now dressed we  went out to the hardware store and bought a ton of nails and a huge sheet of plywood to cover the opening where a window once stood. They don't find nudity humorous as we did.

After a few hours of cleaning  up the gallery wreckage we called the rest of the artists and our friends to fill them in on what happened and to seek their help in in the great gallery mop up operation  so we could continue the Frida event as planned. Fuck those Nazi’s...the show must go on...now more than ever!

They all agreed and arrived to do away with the debris and trash, sweep and mop, empty trash and get the place back into shape...leaving the Frida and other posters as they were. Shot full of shrapnel. We wanted to show resilience and determination in lieu of the attack. We would just call it "performance art"  by the right wing or "The Hell Heil of Hitler" while the gallery event was to now be "Hot To Trotsky - Phase Two!"

Then at night a meeting and wine & dope  party discussion of the gallery’s future. The politics of Berlin best discussed over smoked and injected drugs.

They all left  around 3 PM when we were done with the clean up, we’d already talked to the cops earlier and now time to hit the store down the street run by a blind Chinese man who inhaled paint fumes on a daily basis. We needed to stock up on a supply of beer and wine for the evening.

Sibyll an I were already sans clothing by the time they started arriving at 8 PM. They too removed every article of clothing as they entered. We always felt complete nudity led to complete honesty as you weren’t hiding behind a pair of Levis or a bra. Besides it was relaxing and a room full of 20 naked artists and anarchists was performance art of another order. Erections and large nipples speak louder than words, while the musk in the air emitted by all was better than incense at a Buddhist retreat.

One by one they stumbled in. First Pietro and his newly acquired girlfriend from the Soho District in London who claimed to be a different work of art every time she met you. “Tonight I am Venus De Milo,” she said with the conviction of an escaped  mental patient, to which I replied, “Of course, I didn’t recognize you at first with arms.”She swore she would remove them later. This I had to see.

In fact, later I said we could remove all her limbs and assemble them on a plywood board canvas with hammer and nails in a juxtaposed, just suppose position all helter skelter and call her a Picasso.

Conrad was next to arrive wearing sequins in his hair as he trotted in with his 13 year old wife who was also his sister!. “Incest is best,” he always said. He usually  brought in homeless kids, but gave it up after falling in deep mad mad love with his sisters collection of dolls that let him have his way with their plastic parts.

The parade continued as Keeley, an androgynous female poet with short jet black close cropped hair who appeared sometimes bald was the first to offer up a toast. “To the future...your future, our future, their future!” Which was all Peter Kopek needed. He was  our resident fag queer poet as he referred to himself proudly, “There you go you cantankerous whore. Stealing from Kerouac again! I wouldn’t let you give me a blow job if I was bursting at the seams with a full tank of semen while you recite Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis” while you play with your own tits.”

The strange thing was...I think Keeley and Peter made a great match. Both perfectly bitchy and caustic, not just to each other, but aimed their barbs at anyone they chose depending on their moods, but seemed to take great delight in parry and thrust antics designed to draw verbal blood from each other. She somewhat manly in bearing and he a mincing marvel of  boy-man.

The rest of the group included Corinne, the evil folksinger who was determined at all parties to pick up her guitar and regale us with downer songs of death and disaster.  If we were in a benzedrine mood, she was a musical barbiturate. If we were in a 78 RPM frame of mind, her needle would be stuck at 33 ⅓. IF the song asked "where have all the flowers gone?" She'd tell you they died of plant polio after they were doused in DDT and the neighborhood began having birth defect babies.

Collin Murphy was a hulking mick from Dublin who we suspected had IRA ties and had to hide out in the melting pot of Berlin’s art colony. He was one hell of a writer and fancied himself the next George Bernard Shaw. Limericks with a degree of tongue in chic tongue in cheek bawdiness were his specialty when not writing his novel regarding sex crazed Catholic  leprechauns from Ulster or the Happy Easter Rebellion.

The rest of gang was an assortment of both genders and cross gendered cross dressers, bisexual street hustlers and young male and female  junkies who had certain other talents from the artistic to the carnal pleasures and ready to go to bed with man or woman or both which suited the rest of the group perfectly. “I’ll trade you two haikus for an ass fuck!”

It was all Cabaret meets The Boys in the Band that would eventually end up as one large contortionist orgy while we ran a bootleg 8MM copy of “Fantasia” backwards on the wall while getting it on in a group grope to the sight of dancing brooms and singing mops.

Berlin, 1965 where anything goes…

Chapter Three - Fishnets, Garters & Gangsters

 

Chapter- Three

Fishnets, Garters and Gangsters

We were now dressed, me in my  faded jeans, grey wine stained sweatshirt and my old Salvation Army field jacket, Sibyll in her cutoffs as it was warm today, and a t-shirt that fit snugly to her body with the famous JFK message  'Ich bin ein Berliner'...not East...not West...just ..BERLIN!

 

We grabbed my canvas daypack, loaded it with Agfa black and white film to photograph the recent construction of phase three of the Berlin Walls Darwinian evolution from a mere tangle of barbed wire to a  wall of concrete, rebar, and a crown tiara of concertina wire.

 

Quickly Drained a quick last drop of left over warm wine from the night before and opened the apartment door ready to dash about where before our eyes stood in a ready to knock pose, a one legged dwarf with an Errol Flynn Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckling pirate patch over the empty socket of what would have been a perfectly good left eye, lost in an altercation during a knife fight in a bar brawl in Hamburg during a Rory Storm and the Hurricanes show. The purple fez upon his head made him look like a Turkish Pez Dispenser.

 

“Good morning, Sir,” he spoke in broken English with a gutsy German accent. “I was sent by a gentleman, who would like to meet you this fine morning, and you too ma’am. He is  a certain Mr. Sydney Australia,” he said with his voice raising a pitch as he spoke the hallowed name. “My name is Joel Faberge. Mr. Australia would like the pleasure of your company Sir, along with your  lady friend to discuss, um, a matter of a mutual and beneficial nature to both parties, n’est-ce pas?” First he fractures English, and now plants his linguistic flag on sovereign French soil!

 

He was indeed a Pez dispenser dispensing dialects and phrasing as easily as a the little tart candies themselves.  Strange little fellow..downright creepy in fact...reminded me of someone I knew in the past. A bookish fellow, yes, an  immigrant from Borneo who owned a bookstore and was arrested for selling the Alice B. Toklas Anarchist and Chocolate Chip Manifesto Cookbook, and primarily for taking hidden camera movies of 8MM sex in hotel rooms.  

 

We followed the little fellow down the Yellow Brick Strasse to  the luxury apartment of one, Sidney Australia. The Lollipop guild was alive and well I thought. Sibyll held my arm tightly. Something was wrong here, but we were both curious and forgot that curiosity killed the cat, not to mention the milk truck that ran it over on Easter Sunday.

 

Something wasn’t sitting right with me about this. I had heard of Herr Australia before, and none of it good. Black marketing in vice. White slavery, dope dealing, some even said he smuggled toilet paper to Moscow at one point and provided Stalin with Serbian hookers who used bikini wax on each other in public at train stations. He also   mainly was afflicted with a love of the arts and gambling.

 

Going to meet him against my better judgement was a gamble in and of itself. Loved those huge Rubenesque paintings where the women had breasts the size of large bowling balls and enough flesh on the fanny to accommodate the entire range of the Alps.  

 

We finally arrived at Thirteen Otto von Bismarck Strasse and the elegant  if not over ornate Hotel Eva Braun. My first impression was that we had entered a time warp of a bunker of tawdry, faded Weimar Republic wallpaper and dusty chandeliers . All that was missing was a few suicide victims.

 

Let me paint this picture for you. (Takes a deep breath) Sidney Australia was the Genghis Khan of glitz and glitter holding  court with his mincing minions of Mongol malcontents. He was the gangsters gangsta. He would trade in white slavery, illegal Ukranian drugs,  murder for hire, blackmail and extortion. He would play both sides and there was a price for everything….a steep price.

His apartment was, well, gaudy as hell,  with a decadent overkill feeling of a faux Ottoman Empire Sultan. His penthouse overlooked the elevated metropolis cityscape of the art decadence Fritz Lang inspired Berlin. The decor was  a cross between an old 19th Century Turkish harem and a cheap shag carpeted motel room that charges by the hour found in North Beach in san Francisco. You know the place, we all do. A real Motel Six for sex. Everything was done with an overabundance of chintzy  purple haze curtains, The kind aging strippers emerge from after the dirty comic finishes his routine and the Tenderloin losers hide their masturbation under cover of a raincoat.

 

Strobe lights pulsed suggestively from hidden recessed spaces in the room while a dozen or so strategically placed blacklight strobes  undulated doing a pole dance on the black light enhanced walls. Sidney referred to his abominable abode as a cerebral antebellum….I looked as a William Burroughs pharmacological funny farm with a homosexual surreal reality.

The retro  furniture was overstuffed,  as was our host, so when you sat down you were immediately reminded of a suicide bean bag ride at the amusement park on the moon.


We were about to behold...behold? We weren’t quite sure what we were to behold. Also, I just like the word, no one says that anymore. It’s a crying shame.

 

Sidney’s bulk   entered the room with I have to admit fabulous  flair and fanfare, not to mention while he sang a syrupy selection of Broadway show tunes  to music piped in karaoke style over loudspeakers hidden, decibel snipers waiting for a target for his butchering of the greasepaint greats.    

 

Sibyll  and myself were both startled.  It was showtime as Sidney appeared from behind a curtain I hadn’t noticed before, dressed regally in a full tent Marlon Brando-Fat Elvis kaftan complete with a full face of  makeover make-up singing popular show tunes.
Expecting to see an arch criminal with pinky rings, instead we came face to face with a rotund planet of man in spiked heels, a see through teddy with garters, and mesh stockings. I felt  I was at a transgender summer camp of gender bending frivolity at Frankie's Fantasyland Bar and Grill!

He could have been a gay diva from Mars.  He was bizarre, no question about that, and his voice I have to admit..stellar and  faster than a speeding falsetto...he could bend a Ethel Merman high note in his bare hands.

He had an operatic rock and roll voice and was sporting a turquoise  outer limits outer space high piled a mile high pompadour hair-do that looked like he just stepped out of flamboyant flying saucer cabaret with a cadre of gay aliens and bi-sexual bi-pods. It was the Mikado meets Hermann Goering in eyeliner in a Berlin Bunker. It's "The Day the Earth Stood Still" with Major Tom screaming at ground control. a It's Queer Eye for the Space Guy!



His kingdom was a fairyland...literally, no macho factory assembly lines in  this place as it catered to an assortment of dykes who arrived by bike, intellectual drag queens, street people, the wealthy from the world of art , writers, drunks, junkies, who wandered in and out of lucidity among the collective mass of West Berlin’s social substrata of masturbation and creativity, and creative masturbation. You need to have your card punched to gain entree to this world.

He tossed in a few jokes with his routine. Why not? Jesus did stand up before Seinfeld, gigging at gatherings doing a magic act with parlor tricks and sanctimonious schtick, like that  whole loaves of bread and fishes thing which led to a string of bookings and spoken word performances throughout the Roman Empire. (I heard he stole the Bread and Fishes routine from Rodney Dangerous Maximus who first wowed the crowd while touring the Bibleland with Moses and Abraham, the first of the comedy trios, (pre-dating Larry, Moe and Curly) who played to packed houses of Philistines  in their prime)




He waved us to sit down with a gesture of his hands that was more of a flourish than an invite.

 

“Thank for coming. I must say it is a pleasure to meet at last. I wish to speak to you about going into East Berlin for, ah, to pick something up for me of great importance. In return I guarantee your gallery will not receive any more trouble such as the nasty explosion yesterday.”

 

Son of a bitch! It wasn’t the skinheads after all. The wily old queen had us bombed and now was blackmailing us. Sibyll caught the same message and her eyes got as wide as the Danube.

 

“Of course there is some danger involved and you might if not careful end up in the Stasi Prison system which would be unfortunate.” Two of his thugs then emerged with Lugers in hand behind us wearing only  fishnet stockings and chastity belts. We had been had.

 

“I will send along one of my agents to guide you so it should go smoothly yes?”

 

What choice did we have. We could die now in West Berlin or at least prolong our lives thanks to the wonders of torture at the hands of the East German police where torture was perfected to such a degree they were pure artists, Rembrandts all when it came to sadism.

 

“Appears we have no choice Herr Australia.”

“Ha” he guffawed….(guffaw … another word no one uses today!) No sir, you do not!”

Chapter Four - The Amusement Park Hustle

 

Chapter - Four

The Amusement Park Hustle

Sibyll and I now had no choice but still we had no clue as to the “mission” the old queen wanted us to accomplish. That was about to become crystal clear as we were to meet our “guide” who would fill us in on the project.

 

We were told to meet him at the old Der Park Der Leute, the Peoples Park, which once was the coming of age place for pubescent Hitler Youth, now merely an abandoned amusement park with its rusting ferris wheel, the Bunker of Love ride and of course die Wilde Maus roller coaster  that more than once has had its past share of sheer terror screams as it careened wildly own the tracks.

 

We were scheduled to meet Horst Scheisse, Sydney’s top aide who in addition to handling the more delicate of matters, such as murder and art gallery bombings, was also a ventriloquist with a Marlene Dietrich dummy that many said under their breath of course, was his alter ego. “I vant to be alone!”

 

The park itself was a mere 50 yards from the Berlin Wall and the roller coaster and ferris wheel alone rose higher that the wall giving a full glimpse of East Berlin that could easily be watched for activity. Of course you would also be a sitting target  for an East German sharp shooter with a SG82 sniper rifle used by East German police and military units. Who the hell wants to die by a Soviet cartridge in the chamber. If I’m gonna get shot, make it a good old fashioned made in the USA Remington round.

 

“Here we go, Sibyll,” I said gently as we entered the vacant grounds looking for a psychotic ventriloquist (aren’t they all?)   

 

“It’s a good thing, we’re not stoned on acid,” she remarked. LSD was in its early stages of mass use among the masses. Soon it would become the Volkswagen of choice for drug usage especially here in Germany as it was developed in the Sandoz Labs in Switzerland, home of William Tell and hidden Jewish art and money the Nazis had stolen during the war. So much for neutrality!

 

I had to admit though, being high and munching on a bratwurst on a stick high on LSD and speed and walking through a psychedelic minefield of funhouse mirrors and strapping in for a roller coaster ride where I could look for flying dragons, invisible giant insects and hallucinatory  French erotica of Rubenesque lovelies in lingerie at peep shows grinding away in a field full of horses looking to go bareback in one position or another. Pony pornography on the farm or merely a French freak show?


Imagine if you ever took LSD and ride a roller coaster after seeing your distorted image in a funhouse mirror? I imagine it would confound and confuse Confucius after a day of meditating on a plane of spiritual meditating and levitating over the Yangtze River

 

I could hear the ghost voices of the past.

 

“Step Right Up Ladies and Gentlemen and children of all ages!” There’s something about  an amusement park that makes the tongue salivate for cotton candy and corn dogs, the heart pump fast in anticipation of a death defying ride on the Wild Mouse that could derail at a moment’s notice (now that’s entertainment!) or fuel injects the hormonal pump as the Tunnel of Love where you get to cop that first virgin feel of the girl next door.

 

The midway is alive at night with neon and music and barkers barking and hawking, three balls for a dollar, win a prize, be a man, step right up ring the bell and let me guess your weight.

 

The freak show alone would be worth the price of admission just to see the bearded lady pound nails into a midgets nose while he blows flame out of his ass. The rides are thrill packed as you don’t know if you’ll be stuck for 6 hours high atop a Ferris Wheel or end up riding the malfunctioning Jaws of Life Roller Coaster where an EMS unit with attendants dressed as circus clowns are ready to yell “CLEAR” once they’ve stopped the internal bleeding by stuffing salt water taffy into your wounds.

 

The Merry Go Round is a classic basically harmless ride for the little tykes...for we adult males there is the Mary Go Round, the hooker who sets sail on the Midway looking for locals who want to take a trip into her Tunnel of Love. She’s been around the block a few times or to borrow nautical terms...she now wants to ‘round your Horn! For ten bucks you can get laid in the trailer she shares with Long Wang the Chinese sword swallower and her swallows will delight your Capistrano.

 

It’s colorful, exciting, full of dangerous malfunctioning rides, potential for death by ptomaine Corn Dog poisoning, These are not reasons to avoid amusement parks . On the contrary….it’s the reason we go!

Then a very feminine sultry voice called out from behind a concession stand….”Willkommen meine Freunde..willkommen im Wunderland am Rhein. Ich bin Horst Scheisse.” It was our contact, Horst, or actually it was a Dietrich dummy,  Marlene trying to be the seductress of Oz.”

 

I leaned over to Sibyll and quietly said for her ears only. “Great... our guide and contact is a man named Horst Shit in English and  we have to get our instructions from a kinky transvestite dummy! Why don’t we just turn ourselves into the East German now as spies and get shot now!”

Chapter Five - Showtime In The Kill Zone

 

Chapter - Five

Showtime in the Kill Zone

Journal Entry of Einer Bjarnesen, Berlin, July 27, 1965

Danish Poet and Cross Dressing Mime from Copenhagen  

….Poetry pouring from a fast flowing syringe in some dark beat zen corner of Berlin where only the hipsters dare go, ergo, go go go, while the mime inhales coke up his mime  nose while writing beat prose with a loaded .38 in his hipster pocket ready to explode, firing a cartridge of powder and leaving a body cold in the alley face down,.one more fix should do the trick to give that electric jolt stimuli to the nervous system erasing fear creating words making rhyme for no reason, the counter-balance to an unbalanced society’s sobriety with sobriquets like word bouquets ready to adorn the unborn prom queen before she starts menstruation and has to be home to engage in sexual activity with her brothers who work the high wire under the big top while clowns strip off in the center ring making ready for the circle jerk…

 

Thanks to a ventriloquists heroin addicted Marlene Dietrich dummy we were now left with a jigsaw puzzle of an idea of our East Berlin Mission. It was Picasso all over. A limb cast asunder over there by the dumpster, a nose in the air floating with balloons over the genderless bordello and a leg lovingly wrapped around an empty torso of a male stripper with Nordic muscles.

 

Now we had to explain it to our dysfunctional family of artists. I could see it now. “OK gang, here’s the deal as explained to us by a second party libidinous piece of over sexed Bavarian maple wood and a man named Horst Shit as told to us in a defunct amusement park that was a prototype for a concentration camp for the Katzenjammer Kids.”

The meeting as usual, took place in the group nude mode  (gotta have tradition you understand) at 8 PM that evening in our the apartment libido laden living room.  It was time to scheisse or get off the toilet.

 

“OK, everyone. Listen up. Goddamn it. Chang! No playing eggroll with your pecker at least until we’re done. I may even join you, after all two heads are better than one.” Chang was a highly gifted rice paper artist and calligrapher a small village in Hunan Province, and loved to show off for the lesbians in the room for some reason while fondling  his long time underage Tibetan live in boy-wife from Canada he picked up a video arcade in Banff.

 

Sibyll caught the pass and ran with it from there. It was her country after all and she had the emotional barbells to inspire the others. They listened to her and paid rapt attention, broken English and all. “We were approach by a third party to be  spearhead of mission that could change the course of Germany’s future.”

 

“Well, at least we could prime the pump,” I explained.

“For years,” she continued, “both East and West Berlin have been spying on each other, dat is not surprise. To make long story short, we have been “invited” to go inside East Berlin as a circus troupe of jugglers, mimes and dat sort of ting. Along with us will be three undercover agents. One from the UK, one from US and one French. Who they will disappear from our ranks and assume their cover positions in the East. We will den be joined by the three who have already been dere for 6 months.”

 

(Side note: Sydney Australia was the facilitator of getting agents in and out the West for the East and into the East for the West..for a price to each side, without each side aware of the double dealings! He was not only a mincing drag queen, but a double agent himself!)

 

I took it from there. “Six months is usually the time it takes both east and west to discover agents in the soup and go after then, So we smuggle three in...and smuggle three out.”

 

Pietro fired off a valid question. “What if we get caught?”

 

“Well then we get shot, but the good news is there will be fair show trial after a rigorous round of torture. If we are careful...we won’t  get caught,” I tried to sound as convincing as Churchill waving his derby at the Hun from the cliffs of Dover!

 

Silent nods of heads, good...agreement so far.

 

Margot the resident metal welder and sculptress who made aluminum penis art along with being or resident evil with a weird smallish third breast had a question. “I can’t see the Eastern Sector just letting us walk in and walk out. There has to be a catch.”

 

Sibyll and I looked at each other. Finally I spoke.

 

“We will put on a rehearsal here at the gallery, in fact a one act play that leans to the left as well as a trial performance of what we will call the  Solidarity Circus. The Russians and East Germans love anything with the word Solidarity tossed in as much as they love vodka and beer. The highlight will be a life size human Punch and Judy show where we show the west at the bully nations. As a result of this very public performance Sibyll and I will both be arrested, and the newspapers and radio will carry the story to give us a stamp of commie appeal. The East monitors closely our news so they will be aware of our efforts. Once released on a technicality we apply to the East to give a performance for our “comrades”  behind the wall….”

 

The plans was agreed to and now in motion….

 

“Look we have  seven days to come up with a Punch and Judy act and for some of you  to learn the art of fire breathing, sword swallowing, and miming and clowning.   Volunteers? Any dwarfs you know that might be interested. Dwarf juggling and dwarf mimes would be a nice touch.”

 

They all signed up for the various positions and within a day or two we’d be ready to get our act together. Horst and Marlene would join us for the circus and the Heil Hipster trek to East Berlin.

I let Sydney know the plan and he was already greasing the palms of the local police and the journalists to be ready for the arrest and press to give us our cover story.

 

It was almost Showtime in the Kill Zone!

Chapter Six - Don't Step on Land Mimes

 

Chapter - 6

Don’t Step on Land Mimes!

Let the freak show begin! We had a reprieve and instead of one week we had one month to get our duct tape of a carnival circus & sideshow in shape for our forbidden foray into the bowels of East Berlin for a bit of covert undercover recovery medicine show to extract three Western agents out and insert three new agents into the belly of the Soviet beast.

 

We had filled all the roles of the human Punch and Judy Show utilizing an all midget cast. Midgets are fun to watch especially when you dress the little fuckers up as Italianate hand puppets with attitude and you’ll be ready to follow the Kremlin Brick Road!  

 

To get our political point across that would get us arrested on this side of the wall to solidify our cover, we had written  a scene where, Margot, one of our lesbian thespians pull off the Uncle Sam as Grim Reaper attacking Cuba and small Central American countries that didn’t sing dance to the American beat.

 

One of the shows highlights turned out to be the  mime segments. The standing room only feature was where Pietro posed as  a mine laying prone of the ground, not moving a muscle as another mime strolls leisurely along and steps on the prostate mime at which point the mime jumps up flailing its arms madly yelling “BOOM!” as the other leisurely mime falls to the ground dead...yes...he had inadvertently stepped  on a land mime!

 

As for the jugglers they jiggled and  juggled dressed as those beyond weird Vatican  Swiss Guards with pointed genii shoes and sporting  huge striped pantaloons that would would be more at home  worn by a guard in a Turkish harem salivating in heat over the haven of off limits hymans reserved for a potent totentate in Istanbul.

 

The  clowns were made up to be  Weimar Republic cabaret garish as a bit of whimsy on our part designed to scare the the little tykes for a laugh. They were also the three western agents we were going to leave behind the wall while the three we came to rescue would take their place for the extraction.  

    We decided to go full scale corn on the macabre with our performance so we enlisted the help from the Professor Klingermanns Hamburg Karneval der Naturen der menschlichen Kuriositäten better known to the underworld of good taste, Professor Klingermanns Hamburg Carnival of Natures of Human Oddities, people right at home on a construction site who could and would pound nails up their nose instead of snorting coke, swashbuckling pirate types swallowing swords instead of pharmaceuticals that would make William Burroughs and his stoned adding machines proud.

 

We found a plethora of weirdness  in three ladies who could feast by eating and breathing fire with  gusto and could create a flamethrower tower of power to light Hemingway’s cigar before he could pull off a double barreled shotgun blast.

 

We had werewolf gentlemen, elephant men and bearded ladies with enough tattoos to resemble a Burmese tribal leader. We also discovered the  yin and yang of our own Eng and Chang, the famed P.T Barnum Siamese twins who managed to stay joined in holy matrimony while joined together themselves for life...imagine that honeymoon!! Roll over Eng, it's my turn to Chang..to chang is verb! These guys were the Asian doublemint twins gone kink! Our twins were a couple of Hungarian bi-sexuals who could do things with latex and balloons  you wouldn’t believe!

 

Our Solidarity circus was an explosive conflagration of contortionists sharing the stage with exotic belly dancers from Turkey with sheer costumes that if the sun was just right, and it always seemed to be, you could see the shadows of shapely legs and hidden patches of fur  that would surely cause the imagination to run rampant and wild with the thoughts of a carnal tryst with a contorting belly dancer no matter what country or planet she was from...the possibilities were and are endless. My dream is to make love to an Amazonion contortionist who can wrap her legs around her head from a sitting position and I can be a pivot point...insert your own visual here.

 

Some of our acts would attach themselves to lightbulbs and provide the electric current to light up Broadway or a full string of Christmas lights adorning the Pentagon, while others would escape from straight jackets while chained upside down in tanks of water. All that's missing to really rock the house are a dozen piranhas to add to the maudlin ambiance and possible amputation of limbs in a feeding frenzy of deranged fish.

 

We had, I have to admit some pretty sexy female impersonators along with some very manly male impersonators. An yes. Those damned ventriloquists! Horst Schiesse and Marlene thought they were the top act, but got there  collective woody in an uproar when they found out we had also hired and booked Bjorn Halliday, a Swedish ventriloquist with a gay dummy that performed fellatio on volunteers from the audience!

After a rushed three weeks rehearsing, trying out different sketches and learning the fine art of sword swallowing and fire eating, an mime routines the day had arrived for the debut performance of the Solidarity Circus we held in the small park near the Wall.

The press, arranged through the American embassy attache’ with the aid from Sydney Australia were out in full journalist force  to cover the event never guessing they would soon be covering a bust by the West German police and the arrest of the entire troupe for possible leftist sedition, extreme sexuality (the virgin and burro act!) and inciting a riot.   Exactly what we wanted. Press….ink...radio and local TV coverage for the East Germans to salivate over this small act of rebellion against capitalism. Our entry to East Berlin would then be secured.

 

I don’t know how many of you have been incarcerated before, jail or prison, but in West Germany we were put in a holding tank at first dressed in our somewhat renaissance garb, pointed shoes, clowns and midgets and mimes  that must have put the muggers, rapist dn thieves on edge in the giant cell we had to share.

 

Muggers, petty criminals, a rapist or two and one bonafide serial killer wearing only fishnets and a black teddy were not used to seeing a collective of lunatics who seemed to have fallen from weirdo heaven  or have been evicted from some deranged Mother Goose Book to planet earth.

 

It was showtime! Next gig? SRO in Eat Berlin!!!

Chapter Seven - How Sex Brought Down the Berlin Wall

 

Chapter - Seven

How Sex Brought Down the Berlin Wall

Well, OK, not exactly, but if you look at it as foreplay to its destruction you may have a political wet dream or two as only one to fuck a Commie! In 1965 in a divided Berlin, Sibyll and I and our compost pile of artists and activists saw that promiscuity and politics do make for strange if not interesting bed partners now that we were about to breach the wall and go under cover under the political covers into the vagina of East Berlin.

 

We were released on schedule by the West German and American authorities right on cue where we immediately, through the greasy slick wiles of one sydney Australia applied to bring our traveling road show across the border. We hoped they kept up on the news of our bust and would welcome us as a down and out junkie hooker welcomes a customer with a soiled $50 dollar bill and no history of venereal disease!

 

East or West...Sex makes the world stay the course of its orbit, and when you do it by political leanings you’ll find the left is so much sexier than the right! Even then, on the Left there are many layers that need to be stripped away until complete nirvanic orgasm is achieved on the mental, physical and spiritual planes.

In the Solar System of Socialism a socialist will talk all the way through the act to the point of orgasm thereby ruining any mood that may have tried to surface, but on the upside they will want to include as many people under the covers to share the sexual wealth! You know, a sense of Utopian Community. So forget a threesome….you might end up with ten participants all with 10 different theories of how to achieve a sexual climax that is fair for everyone!

At the far end of the leftist spectrum, a damned anarchist (you’ll find them smoking tulips in Amsterdam) will  want to detonate and explode a device first to get in the mood and then make you read leaflets on how to screw an  in 10 easy steps. Forget masturbation...it’s all about manifestos!

 

However Comrade, do you want an erection as strong as the Berlin Wall? Do you want to cream in your bootleg jeans in the Kremlin? Then head on back to the USSR! Those Moscow Girls will knock you out.

 

Das Kapital is not exactly the Kama Sutra and the ABC’s of the KGB do not add up to a capitalistic romp under the hammer and sickle bed covers. You could have a go with a a steamy Socialist,  but a Red Square vagina from the Volga will out perform a Democratic Socialist every time.

 

Now as for a West German capitalist babe, she will by her very nature want to charge you...after all it is a pay as you go charge it economic mantra as you try to occupy  her pubic region, but you’ll need a permit first.
The Communist lover on the other hand does it for the party, so party on! Your hammer and her sickle can make sex one of the most exciting experiences since East Germans tried to jump the Berlin Wall to freedom.

 

The Communist girl will also use protection..red star sponges of course to block the little infiltrators from scoring a hit in the Motherland. Sometimes she will not use protection and will let the little sperm defect to the other side.
She’d give Lenin a hard-on as he lay in state  while you try to find her G spot tucked away in her Red Square..so if your tremblin’ for sex in the Kremlin...you may find a willing Commie in a closet..but until then you’ll have to find red star gold star vaginas in Vietnam….North Korea...China...or Cuba...oh...or Madison, Wisconsin...Sex Workers of the World..UNITE! The next time you run into a commie bombshell..don’t say Fuck You….say it loud and say it proud...FUCK ME!!!

 

Grab your rubbers East Berlin….we’re coming in!

Chapter Eight - Checkpoint Charlie

 

Chapter - Eight

Checkpoint Charlie

Paris in the spring, romance and art over easy on the Left Bank….Rome, the romantic capital of Italian amore with the Coliseum for a gladiatorial backdrop…. London, Romantic pubs and royal castles to seduce the senses and bring about a feeling of fair maidens in distress wearing chastity belts romping around the knights of the round table during the gilded   age of Chivalry…As robin Hood saidin the Nottingham Massage and Hot Tub Parlor…”Wo made Marion?”

 

Now let’s examine East Berlin. If cinder block chic excites your Ukraine, then Checkpoint Charlie, is the gateway to  all the romance of a roll of coarse Soviet toilet paper made of recycled Brillo pads. Ominous and forbidding for anyone in the Western sector of the city seeking to the enter the Ninth Gate of proletarian lunacy!

 

Checkpoint Charlie was a Soviet erection (do Soviets get erections?) built by  communist East Germany to prevent its citizens from fleeing to the democratic West. While it was only one of several crossings in and around Berlin—there was also a Checkpoint Alpha and Bravo—Charlie was notable for its location on Friedrichstrasse, a historic street in the American-occupied city center.

 

The United States, France and Britain stationed military police at Checkpoint Charlie to ensure their officials had ready access to the border. The Allied guards spent most of their time monitoring diplomatic and military traffic, but they were also on hand to register and provide information to travelers before they ventured beyond the Wall. Even if we were merely  a motley assortment of anarchistic clowns, mimes and jugglers with a penchant for politics and nudity.

 

We had our permits to perform behind the Wall and all our documents were approved by both sides.  

 

The East German authorities scrutinized us with a wary eye and fingers lovingly cradling automatic weapons ready in case one of the mimes went psycho.

 

Unknown to us prior is that we were to be assigned two “guides” who were also circus performers at one time. “Guide” in East German is “guard” to make sure we didn’t venture off the beaten path to steal state secrets.

 

There was Klaus Hanover who was dressed as a gay diva from the planet Mars...probably the Eastern Sector of the angry Kremlin red planet!

 

Definitely a strange Bavarian Rigoletto being..faster than a speeding falsetto who looks like he just stepped out of a flamboyant flying saucer cabaret with a cadre of gay aliens and bi-sexual bi-pods. All I could think was damn!  He’s one hell of a flaming bizarre Bavarian version of the the Mikado meets Hermann Goering in eyeliner in a Berlin Bunker. It's "The Day the Earth Stood Still" with Major Tom screaming at ground control . It's Queer Eye for the Space Guy!

 

He also camped up the amps in the a production of Wagner's "Das Rheingold" at a place called, appropriately, the Ridiculous Theater Company. ...he was of course the Rheinmaiden and the Wood Bird, not to be confused with Woody Woodpecker. In time his flouncing around on stage in costume wearing ass hugging spacesuits, capes and sang 19th Century operatic tunes. The big kick finish to his  show on stage in those days was a collision of strobe lights & smoke bombs.

Sibyll was enjoying a quiet internal laugh as she knew I had to make him a part of the troupe if we wanted to get to the agents inside and drop our spy load at the same time. She also enjoyed my discomfort as the lipsticked Klaus Hanover who was one of those touchy feely sorts kept grabbing my hand as if to say “until death do us part”!

 

Then it was my turn! The other “guide” was a quite buxom blond whose chest size alone could have been V-2 rockets ready to launch and join the Battle of Britain all over again.

 

  Helene was the epitome of the German  Girl of the Sixties and had in recent years  "come out" of the closet and prided herself on getting down and dirty with all three genders...not sure if there is a third one but if there were...she’d find it and seduce it before breakfast was over.

 

“Well, Sibyll. Looks to be either competition or a gift from heaven for you,” I laughed.

 

Her response? Typical Sibyll. “Lets both get her up on the rack and give her  a full gynecological examine.”

 

Later we did enjoy a romp with her on her terms  and discovered she does not have a prolific forest of pubic hair or a vaginal crater for a Cosmonaut  to land his moon rover with rocket boosters to explore her south of the navel border region or her full moon!

 

Before it was fashionable she  was as clean shaven and waxed as a fresh polished apple. She had that bikini wax appearance which is inviting, almost every woman I've been with has something of a coonskin cap topping the region where there is sexual fire in the hole. Either way..it works wonders for me. Besides it beats masturbation where a bird in the hand is no match for one in the bush!


We found later in her dossier that she  had a dark past of debauchery and prostitution that proliferated in post-war Germany.

She was a hooker who specialized in servicing rich German men.. She was German Expressionist Film Noir all rolled into one  package and was indeed a fantastic lover...if you're into threesomes or foursomes.

Inflatables don't count in this discourse. She  gave new meaning to the term "toy box" and her box meant business and she would phuck for a fist full of pfennings.



She talked about sex and nudity.  So OK she wasn’t exactly Little Orphan Annie or Little Lulu..in fact Lilli had big lulu's! She wore two piece bathing suits while Strasse Strolling   so was well ahead of the beach blanket bingo crowd showing plenty of flesh for all those wearing raincoats in summer and engage in strange behaviour while looking up a catholic school girl dolls' plaid dress  as a contact sport.

Oh hell, this is Germany after all the birthplace of anything goes hetero-homosexual cabaret, Marlene Dietrich and Fritz Lang  films from the island of German Gothic Expressionism!

She was blonde and aryan...Nordic and ponytailed and  yes, she was bikini waxed in her Berlin bunker region so that was the first pubic Iron Curtain to be removed before the Wall came tumbling down in the 80's.

She and Klaus were now part of our circus troupe and as for Helene..,. If they held a casting contest for a super nymphette and a Danish girl won the coveted roll. I’d be surprised. I haven't had a good Danish in awhile now...Swedes are tasty too..but gimme a German over easy and it's bratwurst time in the bordello!!!

Chapter Nine - SRO In East Berliin

 

Chapter - Nine

SRO in East Berlin

The East German police watched our cabaret/circus troupe  penetrate the Soviet sectors vagina with a look that screamed “Where’s Siberia when you need it?” Siberia has a plethora of political prisoners, but nary a mime to work the mines. Sibyll, smiled her radiant best smile and in her native German bade them a “Guten Morgen und Grüße von Ihren Kameraden im Westen!” or Good morning and greetings from your comrades in the West! Good choice of words, Sibyll. Comrades. They can identify with that. Good touch!”

 

She smiled and nodded as we continued walking leading the procession of sideshow freaks and geeks to our lodging in one of those wonderful no star red star cinder block hostels that the Soviet mind finds so fascinating. “I’m sure the whole fucking country is full of masochists heavily into Tolstoy depression and physical abuse as a sport,” I whispered in her ear. I got distracted by her morning scent, a combination of light sweat, herbal shampoo and perfume that made me think of having sex in a rose garden  mixing the odors of orgasm and roses with just a hint of a menstrual cycle. She drove me crazy every day!

 

Once we checked into the Comrade Hilton Hotel 666 we told the troupe we’d get together the next morning  to check out the performance area (where we would meet our three western agents and do the switcheroo with the three we brought in.)

 

Sibyll and I spent the day exploring East Berlin. Very grey and dark and formless in contrast to the West. One thing about going to war with America and her allies...you may lose the war and suffer, but goddamn, do we know how to rebuild you afterwards.

 

After a real East German dinner of boiled potatoes and sausage of questionable lineage, we drank a bottle of Soviet wine which is a notch above a can of heated Sterno with a kerosene chaser, but it did the trick...made us drunk and horny.

 

“Never fucked on this side of the wall,” Sibyll offered.

 

“Nice of you to share,” I replied. “By the way did you remove your Tampon?”

 

She laughed and said, “I forgot, you remove it for me.”

 

“You know these were invented by a German doctor in the 40’s. You guys invent everything,” at which point I removed her clothing and dutifully removed it carefully as if I were defusing a left over RAF bomb near her Brandenburg Gate.

 

We made love behind the Iron Curtain which added an element of Cold War heat to the lovemaking process. “I wonder if Stalin ever read the Kama Sutra,” Sibyll said  in between thrusts and moans to which I replied, “He only knows how to gang bang in a gulag with a bisexual Bolshevik! He’s a fucking uncultured Cossack!”

 

Soon we were spent... our bodies limp … our hearts full as we held fast to each other in the heat of the room that formed our sweat and joined our musk, fusing us together as one. We drifted off to sleep in each others arms….then it happened!

 

The Dream!! Did I dare dream about being arrested as a spy and shot at dawn? No! A torture chamber of horrors in Moscow followed by a beheading by a Tartar sword? No!

 

I dreamt about our circus performance gone haywire as the entire troupe sunk into a quicksand of degeneracy!

 

 

Horst Scheisse, old Horst Shit himself was going ballistic as American dummy, Checkpoint Charlie McCarthy was banging away at Marlene, Horsts’ own ventriloquist dummy, Charlie had her bound and gagged  giving his woody a workout. To the Greeks ventriloquism were the voices of the unliving, so any good con artist prophet could pull off a scam and blame it on the ungrateful dead.

 

The dream got even stranger, I was in a cold sweat. I dreamed  three of our circus performers launched a crime wave in clown costumes, led by Horst  the Ventriloquist who is soon mysteriously murdered! Then a midget East German spy turns into a talking dummy to solve the murder of Horst. I kid you not!

 

In the final dream sequence, I took Horsts’ place and Marlene the  talking dummy takes charge and control,

 

Then the dream got downright bizarre as I became the dummy  and I had to leave Berlin after raping a female Chinese puppet who spoke no English. When a puppet has rape on it's little wooden head, his woody will win every time. Soon I  holed up in a Berlin bunker as the Red Army moved in. I hanging out with a perverse gang of goose stepping Gestapo women with whips and boots where we all were engaged in unlawful sex acts with  underage hand puppets.

 

As a puppet/dummy myself i got a hard on over a marionette, a puppet on strings. She looked like Sibyll and  she was hot in a bad girl sort of way and probably would have made a great topless puppet dancer in her day!

 

The dream took another fast turn when all the mimes began screaming (silently as mimes do) running with machetes to remove the balls the jugglers were juggling, roasting them over the fire eaters campfire that was merely a two midgets turned into a roaring campfire!

 

I awoke with a start and waited to clear my head careful not to awaken Sibyll who it turns out was awake already. Seems she too had a dream where she was a topless hand puppet dancer and I was a hand puppet schtupping her  in a Punch and Judy show in the park by the carousels.

 

We shared our two dreams and decided then and there...no more Soviet wine, but our dreams did lead to me removing her tampon once again! “Remember,” she warned, “I’m not really a hand puppet but feel free to find an opening!”

 

Punch and Judy never had it so good!  

Chapter Ten - The Contortionist Dream

 

Chapter Ten

The Contortionist Dream

 

East German audiences did not exactly get our mojo in overdrive.  In fact it was a VW van stuck in neutral. Why so reserved? They were as  quiet as Russian Orthodox church mice except for polite proletarian applause where appropriate.

 

Sibyll said but they are partial to  mimes because they keep their mouth shut, you know, mums the mime?  No state secrets divulged. No Gulag a go go hullabaloo to dance too with electroshock therapy at the Lobotomy Hotel.

 

Clowns?  Ah, yes. They are perceived  as covert operatives wearing clown shoes and big honking noses working for the Colonel of the  KGB or worse, for the Colonel at KFC!

 

West Germans on the other went absolutely we surrender Berlin bunker bonkers over Herr Punch and Fraulein Judy, the Adolph and Eva of marionette puppetry,  but their East of the Wall counterparts will sit stonily in reserved silence. Maybe the brutality of Punch and Judy reminded them of a recent personal interrogation over some stolen Brillo pad toilet paper or a few pounds of Tsarist Faberge sausage

They did seem to like the exotic flesh revealing thighs of wonder spangled costumes of the females of the troupe. Even the Berlin Wall can’t hide a hardliners hard on! I leaned over to Sibyll, “Well now we know what floats their U Boat!”

 

She laughed and observed, “Look Michael any time a female contortionists shares the stage with a  belly dancer from Turkey gyrating with hydraulic hips, German engineered by the way, you will find you have  old school Weimar winner!”

I could see her point.   Sheer costumes leave the imagination to run rampantly wild over the Berlin wall of decorum, and as a visceral bonus, if the sun was just right,  you could catch a glimpse of shadows of long shapely legs and and fine highly tuned rear ends that would surely cause a quick draw showdown of an erection. Even I was running  wild out of control with no brakes downhill with the thoughts of a carnal tryst with a carnival contortionist belly dancer no matter what country or political manifesto she was weaned on  ...the possibilities were and are and for all time, always will be infinite and endless.

 

My dream (Sibyll tried to fulfill my fantasy one night as we were swimmingly drunk on Germany’s finest white wine) is to make love, no make that lust to a  contortionist who can wrap her legs around her head from a sitting position and I can be a pivot point...insert your own visual here.

 

Some of the stranger acts only an  East Germans seemed to get a charge over were the electro freaks who could attach themselves to lightbulbs and provide the electric current to light up a full string of Christmas lights at the Reichstag!

 

“You know Sibyll, I bet some of the others would love to see escaped mental patients in Soviet  straight jackets chained upside down in tanks of water while a dozen piranhas would add to the maudlin ambiance with  the possible amputation of limbs in a feeding frenzy of deranged fish!”

 

“You’re sick, Michael. But that’s why we love each other.”

 

“Well, as long as we are deranged together. Wanna make love behind the tent? Honest, the mimes won’t say a word! We can dress as clowns and honk each others horns?”

 

She gave me a small fist shot on the arm that came with a gentle laugh.

 

“Later, maybe we can some midgets to join us!”

 

Love that girl..always thinking ahead….

 

As we pondered whether or not to fuck under the big top or on a trapeze, we noticed more and more we were  under the microscope of the watchful eye and rat-a-tat-tat machine guns of the itchy trigger happy East German police.  We noticed too, a number of what had to be KGB agents cruising and perusing the crowd as if one of the East Germans may attempt an escape by hiding behind one of those rather large Aryan female Brunhilde operatic belter of screeching tunes for the Fatherland!

 

We also were aware that the three agents from the US, UK and France were on site and ready to make the switch with the three we brought in as part of the circus troupe. The switch would be tricky so we would cause a diversion to pull off the magic. Should we saw a mime in half or have one of the fire breathers torch the tent? Decisions … Decisions.

 

We managed to lead the operatives to the dressing room tent where their counterparts were already awaiting them, costume and all. This was getting a little too James Bondish for me but what the hell….There was a flurry of costume and street clothes exchanged, documents from the East all forgeries by the finest West German criminal  counterfeiters in hand and identities swapped…

 

All looked well at first...the trick was getting the previous agents out without being caught with our pants down.

 

We needed a diversion...mimes were everywhere infesting the neighborhood with Marcel Marceau Recon Units looking for a new home even Helen Keller would feel at home. They tell me   that a mime in the sack is worth more than two jugglers and a ventriloquist for a foursome...a fivesome if you count the dummy. Let’s see, I’ll see your mime and raise you two fire eaters and a contortionist who does a fabulous pretzel act while standing on YOUR head! It would be hard to untie a contortionist and as for fucking a ventriloquist you don’t want to confuse a woody with a goody. “Hey, you had orgasm and I didn’t even see your lips move!”

 

All this because of the Berlin Wall! It was the personification, in concrete and barbed wire of a political prophylactic, I could see it as a musical production in the future at the gallery complete with rousing musical numbers, flamboyant dance choreography, and outrageously fabulous costumes! It’s ‘Boys in the Band’ Meets ‘The Berlin Wall’!!

 

Hard labor with show tunes!

 

Forget Rogers and Hammerstein...this is a Hammer and Sickle race for theatrical space.

 

The Berlin Wall is an extravagant Soviet song dance number where “Break On Through the Other Side” with Igor Morrison of the Defecting Doors on lead vocals brings the utopian crowd to their feet, while the Bolshevik Beach Boys belt out in perfect harmony “Ukraine Surfin’ USSR”

 

“Don’t Cry for me Czechoslovakia” will bring tears to eyes. Hell, just trying to spell Czechoslovakia made my head rotate in a 360 degree demonic possession spin. It’s duck & cover showbiz, kids. It’s the Eagle & the Bear… get your tickets today and relive the nostalgia of the Red Scare and nuclear annihilation. Now those were fun days….

 

“Sibyll, dammit this cold war is making me hot!”

 

She laughed and grabbed me by the balls….”You my American man are always in heat. I did bring the handcuffs so be patient. We work now you gorvel later, ha!” Damn I love when she gets all Gestapo on me!!!

Chapter Eleven - Chaos at the Carnival

Chapter Eleven

Chaos at the Carnival

We eventually did produce a musical with Cold War panache and flavor, if nuclear annihilation  is your cup of radiation tea, but today in East Berlin things began to fall apart faster than a cheapo Sears Roebuck suit off the rack.   We had the agents swap places and were ready to wrap up the circus when all hell broke loose.

 

Not a good day to have the KGB prowling around. Unknown to us until  Horst Scheiss ran up to us screaming and screeching! It seems the ventriloquist dummies and marionettes  had been shooting up good Marseille heroin, no doubt purchased in the French sector from a sleazy waterfront pervert wearing a purple fez beanie copter.  All five were nodding off in the Dog Face Woman’s tent. Needle tracks ran up and down their arms while they puffed hungrily on long stemmed Chinese fortune cookie opium pipes while the Turkish belly dancers pranced around topless playing Broadway show tunes  with their finger cymbals.

 

Worse yet, the hand puppets were jacking off the puppet crew,  while Punch and Judy were snorting cocaine and swearing in front of the children who sat silently afraid to move a muscle!

 

Even the Siamese Twins were there eating bricks of hashish shot from gigantic Pez dispensers that made their heads spin out of control in opposite directions as they recited Sanskrit poetry  about camels in heat mounting Lawrence of Arabia.

 

The jugglers were in the next tent tossing around shrunken heads of Evangelical missionaries obtained from the Pygmies from the Congo  and Jehovah Witnesses they found in a steamer trunk of the notoriously queer Samoan strongman who kept a midget on a leash for a pet.

 

The mimes were turning tricks for the carnival barkers with more tattoos than teeth yellowed by nicotine. The mimes were all lined up in a row, sexual dominoes ready to fall into  Fellatio’s Inferno. (Leopoldo Fellatio was a writer for the Vatican but was beheaded when he referred to it as the Vatican’t.) The trouble with mimes is that they are so quiet you never know if they had an orgasm or not.

 

The clowns were crazed on methamphetamines trying to fuck the merry go round horses going up and down to organ music renditions of The King and I, while the cone headed human pincushion man hammers nails into his head  while inhaling DDT and roach killer in a spray can while exposing himself to the group of Dominican nuns in wheelchairs, all victims of a hit and run by a drunken school bus driver who thought they were bowling pins and his bus was a big ball.

 

His average was 250...after he knocked down all the nuns, he  knew he had the high score for pedestrian bowling... a record that would stand for a decade until an Amtrak jumped the tracks in downtown Chicago into St. Vincent’s Church during a First Communion of Hungarian immigrant children whose parents slaughtered cows at the stockyards for a living.

 

The East German secret police and Soviet KGB agents  who only had sex on Lenin’s birthday discovered the debauchery just as we did. Things took a turn for the worse when one of the sex crazed mimes was found having sex with an inflatable Karl Marx doll!

 

That was it….the East German authorities came down on us faster than a blow job by a J. Edgar Hoover vacuum cleaner. We were all rounded up, the patrons were hustled back to their one room apartments, while we were taken to the former Hermann Goering Ministry of Justice where you are guaranteed a fair trial followed by death by firing squad.

 

Goddamned sex crazed mimes and junkie puppets!

 

Chapter Twelve - Rearview Mirror of the 60's

Chapter Twelve - The Rearview Mirror of the 60’s

Throughout the Sixties. Sibyll and I were caught up in the whirlwind of events overtaking Europe. In ‘68 we were in Paris marching in the street in the largest revolt in a democratic country at the time. It brought the government down, while the government went about it’s daily business bashing in  heads yet at the same time because of it their reactionary actions were uniting the French workers, students and general public. Unlike in America where protest was creating a generational war, Europe united. America was love it or leave it, Europe was join together we are ONE. Regarding the counter culture and change in America of the Sixties...John Lennon said.. “We blew it!”

 

While San Francisco became ground zero for the counterculture in the late Sixties, Sibyll and I were off and running in Jolly Olde England,  which was a compost pile of quaint Quant, mods on Vespa scooters, rockers on Marlon Brando Harleys, Arthur Treachers fish and chips, the dashing little Mini Cooper (as opposed to Alice Cooper) George Bernard Shaw, Professor Higgins  and Eliza Doolittle not to forget Peter O’Toole and Peter Sellers. Carnaby Street not as bleak as the Berlin Wall Strasse. Union Jacks galore, James Bond and Pussy Galore, and not one damned Hammer and Sickle, and the Queen was more vibrant than Willy Brandt!  

 

We got  our political street feet wet in the Sixties  in Holland, Amsterdam to be exact. Move over Merry Pranksters! Before the clock struck midnight at Cinderella's counterculture ball, we in Europe were well ahead of the Merry Pranksters acid tests that helped define the "hippie" gen. In addition to our art gallery in West Berlin we got ourselves Amsterdamned as the damned Dutch were already flying eight miles high and light years ahead of hippie happenings and behemoth be-ins where Hunter's buffalo roamed and Ginsberg Om'd. Remember the Happenings and Human Be-Ins in America in the late 60's? The Provo's were having Happenings and Be-ins as early as 1963...the American counter culture followed shortly afterwards in the the wake of the counterculture awakening of Europe.

 

At one point to exploit media attention to marijuana reform the Provo's rented a bus to travel Europe to spread the gospel of ganja...again...before Kesey and Further took to the rolling paper road. The Provo's crossed borders and kept the bowls full of illegal substances and meticulously hid the "real shit" when coming to a border crossing

Make no mistake, these were the original  protest punks who packed a sociological punch with a winken blinken and nod to the Marquis de Sade and loaded to the Dr. Benbay max with a hyper hypodermic needle full of the illogically logical absurdity of Dadaism that eventually tore the fabric of Dutch society where dykes could live harmoniously along dikes...weed was freed and prostitution was now the legal norm as the legal tender loins enticed and entranced.

 

Sibyll and I had been in jail in West and East Berlin..can’t do one without the other. The food was better in the West, but the East was by far way ahead when it came to cockroaches.

 

Now as the Sixties disappeared in the rearview mirror of history we found ourselves in 1974 back in West Berlin, only this time we were in the delivery room at a West Berlin hospital. Sibyll was pregnant with twin proletarians that we managed to pinpoint were conceived on our spiritual trek for peace and hashish in Tibet the previous year. We always enjoyed our sex, but to fuck at 14,000 plus feet in a yurt on the village of Babar was a dream. The first time we had sex was when we met in the states and we drove together from NYC to camp out in Death Valley. Maybe it was the acid and weed,  but we did screw below sea level and didn’t need a snorkel or rubbers.

 

Since then we’ve done it at every geographic highlight we could find….One night in the dark hidden behind the base of the Eiffel Tower and one night outside in the bushes of Buckingham Palace!

 

We were still running the gallery which had gotten more avant garde over the years,  in fact almost pure Dadaist and our focus now was new artists for arts sake along with our new program of bringing art and theater outside with more public performances and encouraged the graffiti and mural art that was beginning to appear on the West side of the Berlin Wall...a political statement in itself.

 

Now we had to focus on being parents. Twins were one the way. A boy and girl! We even discussed if we should get married or not. We had always felt it was an establishment ploy to keep attorneys busy in case of divorce and we didn’t need a piece of paper to seal or love...but now….babies...children...What the hell...it was the 70’s now…. And all we had to fear was Disco!

 

Chapter Thirteen - Diapers & Revolution

 

Chapter  - Thirteen

Diapers and Revolution

We named the twins, Guntar and Ingrid, after her father and Ingrid Bergman. I admit to having a huge crush on her since “Casablanca” so Sibyll humored me on that point.  

 

Sibyll and I had weathered many political storms and engaged in protest, riots and the counterculture merry go round ride from Paris to London to Amsterdam as we Amsterdammed it, and back again to the ghost bunkers of Berlin.

 

Now, I faced a more daunting task. How to change a diaper! Something to do with forming triangles and using safety pins so that were joined as one entity inharmonious synchronization (This was damned near a trigonometry test!) to gather the refuse of babies after a full jar of Gerbers plum pudding, sickly green veggies or tapioca.   Ever notice how often babies smell like tapioca?

 

Breastfeeding is about as natural an act as a human can perform and Sibyll was a damn good performer. When it came time to breastfeed, she was Josephine Baker doing her famous cabaret Banana Dance! I admit to all of a sudden having a craving for some fresh sibyl milk versus a stein full of  beer, mainly because her milk dispenser was a hell of a a lot sexier than a spigot on a aged keg!

 

As for the gallery, I assumed the bulk of the workload so she could devote her time to Guntar and Ingrid. I was a whiz at writing and directing plays and being the Zeus of PR, but when it came to potty training I was a complete wreck.  

 

By 1983 the Gallery was pretty well known for its eclectic compost of artists and bonafide weirdos of every strip. Weird in the eyes of the established citizenry. We featured works by homosexual artists and homosexual themes, women’s liberation art was prolific and abundant...the times were changing with such  rapidity it made your head spin with or without an exorcist standing nearby.

 

Even the Soviet Union with Gorbachev at the helm of the ship of state was being to see it’s Iron Curtain fray and tear in spots such as in Poland with it’s  Solidarity movement giving a fuel injection to other soviet Bloc countries to give the Motherland the middle finger

 

One day in 1985 when I was setting up a gallery display of Sibyll’s latest artwork  I got a frantic phone call from Sibyll’s sister, who was visiting at the time.

 

I raced upstairs and what I encountered turned my blood cold. Sibyll ws sitting on the floor in complete physical disarray holding a butcher knife screaming that  our two children were from space and out to kill her along with the flying cows coming at her from the trees outside.

 

It was the beginning of her nervous breakdown and the doctor’s diagnosis of schizophrenia. I and her sister talked to the docs and the best course of action was to have her committed to the the West Berlin Asylum as a patient.

 

For the next four years I would visit every other day and when I took the children it was on sunny days when we were allowed to take her for walks outside on the grounds. I never wanted them to see her in her small cubicle of a room nor hear the wailing and screaming of the other ward patients.

 

I was now a single parent in one respect but those kids needed there mama and when around her they brought life to her eyes, while she filled their hearts with love as I hid my tears as best I could/

 

I also made sure we made small trips to Cologne to visit Guntar and Ingrid’s grandparents on their small farm, sharing a beer with Herr kalff watching the little ones  enjoy life feeding the sheep and horses and planting seeds to watch food grow. They were wonderful pleasant days. I enjoyed their company immensely.

 

Soon, the land that Marx built was about to  come crumbling down. 1989 to be exact.

 

The twins were now 16, and like their parents, had that fuel injection of art and activism running full throttle through them. They were both A students in school and joined the drama club and debate team always taking the Devil’s Advocate approach to things. A chip off the old blocks.

 

Once a week I was allowed to stay overnight with Sibyll were she would joke about her schizophrenia and ask which of her personalities I wanted to make love too? Decisions, decisions! I’d tell her all of them and would let her know who rocked my sheets teh best!

 

Then it happened.  The Wall was coming down! Thousands were out on both sides, East and West with sledge hammers and any tool that would bring the damned thing to its knees. Germany would now soon be unified, families together who hadn’t seen each other for decades, all would be one once again.

 

That first day Sibyll and I sat up in her bed that overlooked the Wall and held each other close. We had been waiting for this day and now the scene below seemed so surreal yet it was real.

 

One sight we weren’t ready for was the sight of our own 16 year old twins joining the crowd ripping the wall to shreds…

 

“There you go Baby,” I said proudly to her. “Makes a parent proud. We done good!”

 

Sibyll smiled an sunk her head deep on my shoulder. “Yes, we did. Now I can rest!”

 

At that  point I decided to go join the kids and grab some photos for a new display I already envisioned. Once on the street with the kids we looked up to her room and waved...she waved back with a sad smile. After a half an hour I took the kids to dinner along with their aunt who would watch them for me this evening while I would spend the night with Sibyll..a victory celebration. Around 7 PM  I went back to her room which was eerily quiet. She was lying in bed so I gently crawled in to hold her and could feel her breathing contentedly. She never stirred...soon she stopped breathing.

 

I panicked and tried to wake her to no avail. “Nurse! Nurse! We need help in here!”

 

Nurses and orderlies came fast. One of the orderlies saw an empty bottle of barbiturates on the floor. “This was a full bottle this morning, a new prescription!” he informed/

 

I guess she knew she would never be cured and the pain of her affliction coupled with growing depression caused her to take her own life. It’s hard when you’re not in that person’s shoes to fathom why suicide is the path they chose...a husband who loved her madly, two beautiful kids that would have families someday..but it happens.

 

In one day we saw the Berlin Wall come down and the woman I loved died in my arms and I was helpless to stop it. In effect...my world came crumbling down that same day…  

Chapter Fourteen - The Aftermath

 

Berlin Chapter - Fourteen

The Aftermath

After Sibyll died, I continued with the gallery for 10 more years. By 1999 all the friends and artists we had known, enjoyed, promoted and made love to were now quite successful in their various fields of endeavors. The poets were waxing poetic,  the prosers were popular if not cult status writers of note, the painters used a brush and canvas as their political and social justice weapon of choice.

 

My writing was now making a living for me and had debated returning to America after Sibyll’s death as Berlin held too many memories for me to carry or care about living. I contemplated suicide myself, but one look at the sweet faces of Guntar and Ingrid, the twins I immediately changed my mind. They had arrived at that transition age of 16 where rebellion and angst meet in a torrential waterfall of emotion. Besides they loved their grandparents and aunt so didn’t want to wrench them from that environment. Plenty of time for that later when they flew the nest on their own.

 

As 1999 approached, ten years after Sibylls demise the kids, kids? Excuse me the spawn of myself and Sibyll were all grown up and now on their own. Ingrid was working in NYC for the BBC World News Network, North America Bureau as head of research and story development. Guntar was the Bohemian, just like his mama. He, I am proud to say was a musician with his own band, appropriately called the Cold War, and also an actor, mainly in small venues doing remakes of Bertolt Brecht and his Marxist philosophy in Cologne, Hamburg and Berlin. Ingrid was working as well on documentaries on migrant workers and political asylum refugees in Europe.

 

Sibyll would have been proud!

 

Today I live in London. Ingrid now works in London at the BBC and Guntar now is an accomplished playwright.

 

The best part is I now have grandchildren and a son and daughter in law who love their spouses with the same fire Sibyl and I had for each other so long ago.

 

Sibyll would give her best coyote howl to celebrate her family. No, I didn’t commit suicide and now just waiting to join her when it’s my time and she calls for me…..until then I find life in her spirit, our two children and our grandkids she never met….

 

When I do see her….I’ll her all about them and how she lives on...in them...

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 12.06.2018

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Dedicated to the Boomer Generation and all the street fighting men and women who stood up for human rights...