An Open Air Loony Bin on Helmholzplatz
Now that summer is behind us, I can whine about how the
warmest Berlin summer in recent
years just wasn’t long enough. I really
miss my sandals. Really I do. Toes previously Free To Be are now crammed
into shoes designed by tiny, foot-binded Chinese to torture the footloose and
fancy free Western Capitalist Pig Dog (and in so doing, procure a tidy sum,
naturally); no wiggle room for my little piggies. I digress:
Berlin open air
events. Like most of cold, gray, dark,
depressing Europe (and I’m saying that like it’s a good
thing), Berlin suffers from about
300 days of mleh out of 365. So when the
Berlin summer hits, you’d best
get your ass outside and do anything and everything under the sun.
Prenzlauer Berg:
a gentrified district of East Berlin wherein the previous
punk-and-social-welfare-case people get to yell DIE YUPPIE SCUM (in German no
less) to the gentrifiers who scream GET A JOB,
LOSER back at them. It’s great to live
in a former punk quarter which is slowly turning yuppie, hipster and foreigner
and get to absorb the vibe of something old, dirty and skuzzy cleansed by
something cold, antiseptic and sterile.
Perhaps sterile is the wrong word, as Prenzlauer Berg packs in so many
new families that it is now referred to as Parentslauer Berg.
Helmholzplatz: a green park in one of the trendier areas of
Prenzlauer Berg. When I first moved into
the kiez (‘hood), I recall strolling
through the middle of the park and being accosted by a rather inebriated fellow
who started shouting at me and my girlfriend as we passed his bottle-strewn,
piss-reeking turf. Yes, Mr. Intoxicunt, clearly we are The Threat. Together we work to make about the same money
as you get for free on social welfare.
And your flat is bigger and you get to drink outside and wax drunken
philosophical all day long as your means of employment. I’m jealous.
LiederLauschen: some kind of cockamamie music event contrived
in the last days of summer to squeeze the last few Euros out of those who would
soon retreat behind the thick walls of their altbau (old building) flats and enjoy cop show marathons while
pining away for the summer. I don’t know
WTF LiederLauschen means and I’m too lazy to Google it. As One of Those who is too lazy / refuses to
learn another language (read: American), I’ll wager a guess that it means Punk
/ Parent Mixer, because the usual drunken suspects were greeting the stroller
wielding breeders in a one stage, one bar affair. I was hoping for a riot with beer bottles
flung at breeders and a demolition derby of strollers rolling over the scrawny
legs of the punkies, drunkies, junkies and other members of the disenfranchised.
A dozen benches held the butts of those who wanted to warm
them. Just behind the last row of
benches, one of the indigenous park dwellers was burning a pile of paper while
sitting cross-legged with a ghetto blaster on his shoulder. It was turned all the way up--and apparently
had been for some time--as the speakers spewed nothing but flupping, flapping
distortion. Or maybe that was the
band. I’m too square to ever solve that
mystery. The fire burned on and people
walked by. The distortion reached a
crescendo and Chief Squatting Bull began bashing his ghetto blaster against his
skull in arrhythmic blunt beats. The
passersby passed by. What the fuck was
this guy gonna have to do to get some attention?
The first band was warming up. One of those folk diva types sat on a stool
with a loosely slung guitar around her shoulders. Some others held their instruments. I can’t go into details. I’m not a music
critic, though the music sounded about as bad as I expected it would. She finished her mewling and caterwauling and
bowed out gracelessly. Another band got
up on stage while I went to the spaeti to avoid buying overpriced event
beer. I took a swig and looked
around. Chief Squatting Bull’s fire had
burned out and his tape had ended or was destroyed by the skull thumping. Behind him, small squabbles broke out with
the harsh-voiced demi-homeless bench punks.
A park drunk cadged a fag from two young ladies seated in front of us.
One of the girls gave him a cig to pay her dues and make the bastard go
away. Of course he would not. He then began hitting on them—both—in an
attempt to slur and wobble his drunken way into their hearts. They got up and left. He cursed at his knees and I got up to
support the bar for a couple of beers for the event. I was being fully entertained and the stage
had little to do with my amusement. Upon
my return with our beers I noticed a completely different drunk had plunked his
ass down next to my babe. I gently
placed my hand on his shoulder and said that he was in my spot. I’m trying real hard to avoid conflicts. Especially since they seem to fly into my face
like a crank-addled Vegas lap dancer.
The drunk swung his hand out and pointed my way to sit at the
end of the bench. You see, he needed to
continue hitting on my girlfriend. This
was completely understandable due to both the quality and quantity of the
chemicals sloshing around in his slushy melon. My babe quickly slid down the
bench away from Drunkenova and I plopped my ass in between them. Undaunted, the Bishop of Bad Breath heaved
his amorous airs directly around my head until finally, breathless and
feckless, he slowly got up and left.
We took a break from the chaos and left the area for more
beer. Upon our return, the very bench of
my babe’s erstwhile seduction was taken over by a new threat: babies.
A prime example of the Parentslauer Berg tribe was having her attention
span stretched so far that a cesarean section would be necessary to cut
through: one child jumped up and down on
our abandoned bench while another hung around her scrawny neck like a monkey
and the one in her belly kicked in time with the music. She sat behind our abandoned bench and
watched with utter apathy as the bench came crashing down and the bouncing baby
boy landed in the midst of beer puddles, cigarette butts and broken glass. The mother said nothing, as is perfectly
normal for German parents with spastic howler monkey progeny screaming and
bouncing off the walls. Ordnung uber alles my ass.
Perhaps butt cheeks generate their own kharma, and chaotic,
free-spirited ones such as mine must attract all manner of anarchy. After the breeder brood had left and someone
had righted the chaos bench, it came crashing down yet again as we were trying
to reclaim it. It was the fag cadger,
heart breaker, bench flipper. As I
helped him out of the beer/butt puddle, he glared through drunken slits at my
face.
We were out of there.
We stopped once more for beer. As we left the circus, the bench flipping
ciggy bum was curled up in a fetal position on a small stone wall near the path
out of the park. I told my babe that he
still had his bent cigarette sticking out of his mouth. She looked back at the snoring figure and
immediately set me straight: ‘You’re
blind. That’s not a bent cigarette,
honey bunches of oats (she calls me that sometimes). That’s a big ole snot worm.’
O the snot-nosed drunks and babies of Parentslauer Berg!
