NICHT FUN - 1982

In the autumn of 1982 Henri Flesh and I flew to Berlin. We booked rooms at the Hotel Kempenski for a three-day holiday from BSIR, Hamburg's most popular club, after working the entire summer. That night the French DJ and I went out to the Dschungel in Charlottesburg, where we ran into a pair of Christina F lookalikes. All the girls wanted to be the junkie teen refugee from the Zoo Station, who had become a star thanks to her bestselling book, THE DIARY OF CHRISTINE F. My girl's name was Chloe. The ex-ballerina from Koln was as blonde as Ilsa of the SS.

The next morning and gray and misty. We bid the girls auf-wiedersehen, giving them taxi fare and money for a breakfast. Henri and I strolled over to the Brandenburg Gate. The photo image of a Red Army soldier waving the Red Flag over its battered arch was burnt into my head. Concrete barriers barred any approach to the monument to national unity. Nina Hagen, a punk singer, had been granted deportation to avoid becoming a protest figure. This was not the Free World. 

We strolled over to the graffitied Wall and climbed a scaffolding to view over the twelve-foot wall. The heavily-mined 'death strip' was a barren patch of dirt stretching right and left into the murk. Another wall barred any escapes along with an electrified fence. The Cold War was running strong on the front line and the two us smoked Gitanes on the way to get into East Berlin. A huff of Persian Brown helped pass the time and we arrived at Checkpoint Charlie in a nod.

The squat female border guard wasn't happy about letting us into the workers' paradise. We were enemies of the state in her eyes and those of the West as well. She stamped our pass light as ether. The Stasi or secret police had ways of dealing with our kind and two bland men followed us. Unlike the prosperity in West Berlin entire neighborhoods bore the scars of the Fall of Berlin. Bullet holes, shell holes, collapsed buildings, and empty blocks. In many ways East Berlin looked like the East Village.  

We walked through the deserted city and crossed the River Spree to arrive at Karl-Marx Platz, where a thin concrete communication tower rose into the graying September sky showing off the achievment of the DDR.. The fog was so thick the radio spire was barely visible. The stomp of boots startled us and across the plaza a troop of armed Soviet soldier goose-stepped out of the mist.

"There's parking everywhere." Henri wished that we had my orange VW bug.

"Here comes a car." Henri pointed to where a small car whined down the street.

"Wooo, ein Trabant." We waved to the driver and Henri explained that East Germans waited for years to purchase one. It sounded like a lawn mower. The Stasi agents didn't appreciate our laughing.

We drank bier in a restaurant. The people at the tables avoided lifting their heads. They knew how to act around the Stasi.

One big glass cost twenty-five pfennigs. I had enough money for a hundred beers and bought a round for everyone in the restaurant. No one said thank you. No one touched the glasses. They stayed on the bar.

The Stasi approached the barman and spoke in low voices.

"They are no fun." Henri wasn't liking this day trip.

We left the restaurant and went shopping, except there was nothing to buy in the shops.

"Maybe we could score some drugs." Henri entered a pharmacy and exited in a huff. "They were only selling steroids. Last thing I want is to look like an East German female athlete."   

The Communist competitor were three times the man I would ever be in real life.  

"Us too." The girls acted out weighing weights.

The Stasi were no amused by our behavior. Two more followed us. Their message was clear

Heraus auslanders.

"Wir zuruckgehen nach Ost."   

I had had enough of East Berlin.

"Communism is a failure." Henri liked his socialist France.

"Same as capitalism." I hated the consumerism of the West, where everyone's soul was for sale.

I wanted to go back to the hotel and nearing Checkpoint Charlie we gave our remaining East German DMs to a young boy. He looked at the Stasi agents and threw them on the ground, then ran down the street.

We passed through the Berlin Wall at the sunset. No one stopped us at the frontier. We were no threat to the DDR. The dyky border guard was still on duty. Helga had to love her job. Once more back in the American sector I waved down a taxi and told the driver to take us to the Kempinski.

He asked about East Berlin.

"It's a worker's paradise."

"Schiesse."

Even Henri knew the meaning of that word, but neither did I consider the west the Free world. I like Nina Hagen was a punk.

I doubted I would ever see East Berlin again and bid the half-city 'Niewiedersehen', although that night Chloe and I pretended we were spies and I loved lying in bed with her, whispering in my Boston-accented German, feeling oh so James Bond. Oh, 007.

Leather Coat Paris

London 1978

In 1978 I had left NYC to join my model/girlfriend, Lisa. We lived in West London Studio, A two-story post modern complex on Fulham Road. Right at the entrance to the Chelsea football pitch. Game days we didn't leave the apartment. As the opposing crews waged war outside the pubs.

I had nothing to wear that declared I was from the South Shore of Boston and not Strafford Bridge or Westham. I bought a leather coat from a second-hand store on Kensington High Street. A little roughed up yet elegant

Lisa and I returned to America. She left again for Europe in the summer of 1979. She came back in 1981 with a Russian gangster. I liked Vadim. I worked for him at the Continental on West 25th Street. I left when I clocked FBI agents at the after-hours club. I’m wasn’t Vadim.

In 1982 I fled a joint police-FBI investigation to work as a physionomiste or doorman at Le Rex Club for the magazine Actuel on the Grand Boulevard in Paris. Opening night was with Toure Kinda. The basement was packed for the African superstar. A froggie longhair kept bugging me to come in. I told the babacool to wait his turn. Hectoring me with indecipherable French swears resulted in a nightlong ban.

"Twa oncule!" He strode to a dented double-parked Citroen Deux-Cheveaux. I thought nothing more of him, until he ran through the crowd and threw a bag at me. Yellow sprayed from it and I thought it was les frites or French Fries from the pseudo Mickey Ds next door.

Wrong It was yellow paint. Splat!

I stood stunned.

The hippie ran back to his voiture des peasants. The two cylinder engine would not start. Le choc of the attack triggered a rage. I ran the sidewalk, jumped atop a car hood and launched a kick through the hippie's driver side window. I leapt on the roof. Jumping up and down and up and down. Black steel toed combat boots smashed front windscreen. Shattered the passenger door window. The hippie cringed at the steering wheel. The boulevard sidewalks was crowded with club goers. I saw no one.

The car still refused to start. My boots took their toll.

The car coughed to life. The hippie shoved the shift into First and steered into the oncoming traffic. I tumbled to the street. He drove straight into a passing taxi. Crash. I wanted more and scrambled my feet. My security held me back.

Corinne my squeeze gave me a towel. I wiped off the paint. The ghost of it haunted the coat forever. Jean-Francois the publisher gave me 3000 francs. “Go out of town for a week."

I acted on his advice and took a train to London. With the coat. I stood in front of the West London Studio a few times. No sign of Lisa. Only the trace of yellow on the leather coat.

ps Upon my return my bouncers said that I had totaled the hippie’s car. They weren’t impressed. After all it was just a Deux Cheveaux.

Paris In The Springtime - 1982

In 1982 I spent my first spring in Paris
I fell in love that season
Not with a woman, but a city__
The Seine at dawn
Le Louvre

Pigalle
Croissants and crepes
At the creperie outside the disco
LA Palace, le Privilege, Le Balajo et al
My friends

And Angus
Walking Angus along the quai of Ile St. Louis
Both of us wet and cold
And I still love Paris from afar
Pour toujours

Berlin October 1982

Berlin
October
1982
A morning Pan-Am flight from Hamburg
A Geldstadt
Money City
To Tempelhof
West Berlin
Behind the Iron Curtain

Henri Flesh et moi
DJ und Tursteher
Nachtclub Leute
Working Bsirs for the Reeperbahn pimps.

Templehof Gray morning Taxi
Zum der VierZeitenJahren Hotel
Each carrying a small bag
Only have
Two grams of Persian brown
We're remaking Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F
A novel about teenage hookers
Without the writer
We left her in Hamburg
She's safer there__ I look out the window For a familiar face Amongst the unfamiliar faces 1978 Clover The blonde runaway fled New York And a Texas oil baron Fled New York for Berlin East Berlin The orher half of here West Berlin After her departure Two postcards Both from the other side of the Iron Curtain Her new master A KGB colonel "Looks like you only more scars." I have a few more than four years ago Nothing one here looks like Clover Viele Blonded Kein Clover later__

Check into the hotel
Concierge looks like Dirk Bogarde
From THE NIGHT PORTER
A Nazi hiding in plain view
Forty years after the Fall of Berlin
Maybe sixty
A young man in 1945
Not a stray hair out of place
No click of his heels
Still everything about him Nazi__

We unpack
Huff some Persian brown
I wish it were China White.
Change into bathing trunks.
Both of us
Greyhound slim
White as Johnny Thunders
We swim in the tiled pool
It dates back to before the war
The Great War.
1914-1918
Our grandfathers served in France.
Long long ago__

Two couples exit from the sauna.
Speedos for the men
Bikinis for the women
Older
The men
Former Nazis
Proud___

They never lost the war
Henri is French.
He sees them too.
For what they were and are
"Salauds."

They see us for us
Auslanders
I stare at them
Mutter
"Nazis."

The word crosses the pool
They hear it
They know who they were
And who they are
I get up
Get my towel
We leave
Turn
Spit on the floor
"Nie weider."
Never again

On Kurdammstrasse
Wealth
The West
Zoo Station in the afternoon
No whores
No action
Eat Eisbein
Pig foot
Drink Berlin Weisse Bier
At night
Go to Der Dschungel Disco
Dance with TVs
Share Persian brown.
At least this isn't Berlin 1945___

In the AM we go to the East
The Berlin Wall stretching north south out of sight
This side graffiti
The other side
A Death Zone
Ladnmines, dogs, and snipers
Through Checkpoint Charlie
To
East Berlin
Passports bitte
A squat female border guard
We are of interest
For thirty seconds
Willkommen zu
Democratic Deutschland Republik
The DDR
The Workers Paradise Alles ist in Ordernung___

A walk through the ruins
Bullet holes in the buildings
From April 1945
All scars of battle in West Berlin
A Trabant scuttles by
Like an out-of-control lawnmower
No people on the streets.
Very few in Karl Marx Platz
Parking anywhere.
On a back street
Nothing to buy in the shops
The sound of boots
A Soviet patrol
Goose-stepping
Like Nazis
Never again__
Later
A German cellar bar
Order Berliner Pilsner
For the twelve people at the tables
No one drinks them
They are all Stazi Henri says
Secret police
Like the Gestapo___
We leave East Berlin
Without even a postcard.

Back in the West
Capitalism on the K-Damm
We have Persian smack
We
Free
Both of wish Christine F was with us.
Henri more than me
They are something.
At now for now
In both West and East Berlin
Fur Immer and always__

Passing Through Koln - 2011

Published Dec 25, 2011

Back in December 1982 a Paris-bound train approached the Rhine Bridge into Koln. A dark dawn sky shod the winter morning sky. Building lights rimmed the overflowing river. I sat on the left side of the DeutscheBahn passenger car. The six-seat compartment was all mine. Few people took the midnight milk train from Hamburg. It stopped at every station.

Two bags lay at my feet. They held everything that I hadn't wanted to leave in Hamburg. That northern city lived on even less light than Koln. The nightclub at which I had worked was in a slump. The pimps of the Reeperbahn had driven away our 'good' customers. The owner had said that they spent money, although he hadn't paid my commission for the last two months.

SS Tommy was the owner's muscle.

Two days earlier the blonde bodybuilder presented a bill for 10,000 Deutschmarks about $6000. The itemized bill listed my intimacy with a bikini model in detail. I was thinking free love. Hamburg wasn't that kind of city. I handed over SS Tommy the keys to my BMW 2002, which I had crashed orange sets car a week ago in a forest north of the city. It wasn't going anywhere without a tow.

The train crossed the bridge and the silhouette of the medieval cathedral loomed out of the murk. Thousands of workers and hundreds of skilled artisans had spent over a hundred years erecting the massive monument to Christianity. The US Eighth Air Force had conducted bombing raids on the city during World War II. The generals said they avoided targeting the cathedral, but aerial photos show that everything around the gothic structure had been leveled and the towers bore the scares of bombs, showing that those masons and workers knew how to build something to stand the passage of time good and bad. It had survived the bombing raids of World War II relatively unscratched and served as a beacon to the faithful. I was not one of them, but I respected the beauty of its grandeur.

The train stopped in the station. I pulled my hat over my face, fearing that SS Tommy had notified his Gestapo compatriots in Cologne about a fleeing American. The doors closed without a rush of Zuhalterei and the train pulled out of the station. Paris was eight hours away. I already had arrived to safety.

The color of the sky was gray.

All over Europe, but Paris was a city made for that color.

#17 By Peter Nolan Smith For Sale

In April of 1976 I drove a stolen car from Boston to New York. The Olds 88 wasn’t really stolen, since a Back Bay lawyer paid $300 for the disappearance of gas-guzzler.

Several hours later I abandoned the Detroit clunker by the Christopher Street pier after midnight. I threw the plates into the Hudson and left the keys in the ignition, hoping for joy riders to drive off with the vehicle. On my three previous trips to vanish a car, I went up to the 42nd Street Bus terminal and caught a bus back to Boston. This time was different.

I was in love with an artist from North Carolina. Ro said I looked like a fallen angel on her candle-lit bed. She had to be in love too. I walked to the restaurant at which she worked on Christopher Street. The owner said she had quit.

I rode the subway to Brooklyn Heights and walked to 55 Remsen street. She wasn’t there and her roommate explained that earlier in the day the painter had caught a flight to Paris. She had accepted a grant to study art at the Sorbonne. Ro had not left a forwarding address. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t going back to my teaching job at South Boston High School.

From then on I slept at a friend’s apartment on Park Slope. The next day I got a job at Serendipity 3 as a busboy. I moved out of Brooklyn after discovering James Spicer was stealing my tip money. I rented a SRO room on West 10th Street and 5th Avenue. A bed and four walls cost $44/week. I was making about $200 at the restaurant.

After work I took the subway from 60th and Lex to the Astor Place. Usually too wound up to fall asleep I killed a few hours drinking a dive bars before heading back to my miserable room. I wasn’t making any friends fast. One wintry night in 1977 I stumbled home from a derelict bar at the corner of the Bowery and Houston. The icy wind slashed through my thin clothing and I was about to hail a taxi to my SRO tenement on 11th Street, when the thump of a frantic bass emanated from a white stucco building. The accompanying music was rock and roll at its purest and I pushed open the bar’s heavy wooden door.

The leather-jacketed quartet on the stage covered the 45rpm version of The Rivieras’ CALIFORNIA SUN. The audience heave up and down, as if the floor pulsated in time to the 3-chord progression. I stepped forward to join the frenzy.

A huge hand blocked my way.

“$5.” The monstrous bouncer wore a yellow construction hat.

“Who are they?” I handed over the fiver.

“The Ramones. They play punk,” answered the big man.

Everyone in the bar wore leather jackets and the girls had colored hair. CALIFORNIA SUN was replaced by a fast-moving song with a chorus of I WANNA BE SEDATED. I rushed up to the front of the crowd. By the end of the band’s set I was hooked to the music and like that I became a punk.

I have been making small paperback books of the hundreds of short stories I have written over the last forty years. To purchase #17 By Peter Nolan Smith, a tale of tennis featuring Lizzie Mercier-Descloux, Richard Hell, and the master of nobodies the #17 American tennis player in Perpignan 1982, please go venmo @Peter-Smith-18. The cost for a signed copy is $12. As always famous for never.

Champagne At High Noon

In 1970 Xaverian-Westwood High School was all-boy. Still is. I was a math major. My foreign languages were Latin and German. Typing 101 was for football players. Our team was Massachusetts State Champs. 9-0 in the Catholic Conference. I ran track.

Typing 101 class was taught by a woman, instead of a black robed brother. The only female in the school. Mrs. Pepper. A zaftig thirty yeear-old divorcee from the suburbs beyond 128. Every student was male. Many of her class were on the football team. I took Creative Writing instead of Typing 101. I never fathomed the effect of this teacher not taking this class. I wrote by hand. My mother typed out my poems.

In 1976 I moved to New York. I showed up at 55 Remsen Street in Brooklyn bag in hand, expecting a warm greeting from Ro. The soft-skinned artist from the Hillbilly coalfields was the reason that I left Boston in a stolen car. We had been having sex every weekend for a month.

"You look like an angel under candlelight, she had said the night we met at David's Potbelly on Christopher

Lyrical. Love. Sex. New York. A magic formula.

A month later I knocked on the door. Her ex-boyfriend answered the knock.

"Ro's not here."

"Where is she?"

"She left to study art in Paris.

I recognized this scene from PETRIFIED FOREST. Bette Davis' character leaves the desert after a failed writer sacrificed himself, so his insurance paid her studies at the Sorbonne. I had no car and returning to Boston was not in the cards, so I moved into an apartment with a gay impresario from the Riviera Cafe. James Spicer had an extra bedroom in Park Slope. He had a typewriter. I wrote a screenplay about a hang glider thief.

D....Descending.

My typing was shit.No help from Creative Writing. My grammar was even worse. I should have paid attention in English 101 or taken Typing 101 with Mrs. Pepper. She wore mini-skirts. The football team went 9-0 three seasons in a row.

Back in Park Slope my fingers sought letters on the keyboard like an elephant attempting to play Chopin. I typed with beauty without precision. My instrument was an Olivetti A series. I wrote the Detective Poems on this machine.

In 1982 I deserted Reagan America for France. Ro had returned to the States. We had another affair. She never kissed me. Another woman broke my heart. She was in Europe. Where. No idea, My job in Paris - physionomiste at the Rex Club on the Grand Boulevard. The boite du nuit had been financed by Actuel, a counter-culture magazine backed by an aristocrat ne'er-do-well. His New York writer Bernard Zekri liked my detective poetry. My broken meter was very very punk five years after the ANARCHY IN THE UK. Violent Femmes, Toure Kunda, the Slits, the Bush Tetras and numerous other bands performed at the Rex.

At the door and inside the club I met the underbelly of Paris. Models, drug dealers, artists, undercover flics, writers, poets, dancers et al. They came from everywhere. Paris was the center of the world outside of the USA and London.

A German from Hamburg asked, if I could transcribe his girlfriend's interview of Bryan Ferry for Vogue. Vivaca was a top model from Georgia. A girl that beautiful never had to take Typing 101. Jurgen was a handsome tall playboy. Three years older than me. He offered 1000 French Francs for the job. Almost $200US. I said yes and took the Metro from the Marais to 16th Arrondisement. I arrived at noon. Jurgen lived in a small house on Rue de la Tour.

Stark modern decor. He sat me in the white-walled living room with my typewriter. A tape recorder lay on the table.

"Do you need anything?"

No one knew what he did for money, but he drove a 1967 T-Bird and flew around Europe. His clothing caeme from the best designer's in PAris, Milan , and London. A jet-setter of questionable means. Same as Dennis Hopper in Wim Wenders' AMERICAN FRIEND. One of my favorite Wim Wenders' movies. Jurgen knew him of course. He knew everyone.

"Some champagne and a glass. Crystal, if possible."

Jurgen smiled and left the room. He returned with a bottle of Cristal-Louis Roederer and a single crystal flute. He thought that I was cool. I thought the same of him and we became friends to the end, despite my shitty typing and today I opened a bottle of Prosecco with my good friend, Andy Pollock in Fort Greene. It was before noon. I drank my fill before 2pm.

Here's to you, Jurgen and Mrs. Pepper and all the bad typists in the world.

It's Post Time.

ps I don't drink anymore.

Perpignan 1982

In June 1982 my college friend Nick Napoli came to Paris. Walter D was DJ for the Rex Club's final 24-hour marathon of new wave and ethnic bands featuring Toure Kunda and Virgin Prunes. We weren't straight for any of those hours. The club's manager Olivier had a family beach home on the Cote Vermillion i.e. Perpignan on the Spanish border. Nick rented a car. We greeted the next morning on the Autoroute Du Sud.

Here are fotos of my friends.

We are still good friends.

England was taking back the Falklands, Israeli was aiding massacres in Lebanon, and Roland Garros was featuring championship tennis. It was on the TV. Olivier told his father that I was the 17th ranked tennis player in the USA. He believed his son. Dodo proudly told the entire town about his guest. To this day I am # 17 in Perpignan.

Perpignan was an old city dating back to the 10th Century. Old people lived within its walls. The young fled to Paris, Montpelier, and Avignon. For fun Olivier suggested Collioure. The old port was down the coast. The Spanish and French had fought over the strategic city for centuries. It was more Catalan than either. Olivier offered to drive. Nick didn't trust Olivier behind the wheel.

"Me neither," I added. The French tended to drive like every trip was a qualification for Formula 1.

Collioure was a dream. Two beaches. A warm sea. Olivier knew everyone. Hlaf were his cousin. At a harborside pier Walter spun records. Nick and I danced with two girls. They were cute and in their 20s. I had just turned 30.

We brought two girls back to Carnet-Plage. They were good fun. But only in a non-Biblical sense.

For some reason William Buckley, Jr. was in town. He followed us around the city. I don't think he was after me.

Oliver agreed.

When he asked about wearing espadrilles, I said, "They look good on you."

It was the South of France.

I got a pair too. $10.

Espadrilles sucked for climbing around the Templar ruins of the Langue d'Oc. I was okay in the classic footwear.

Olivier was less amused. He slipped on the rocks.

But he didn't stay angry. The next day Olivier, Walter, Nick, and I returned to Collioure. The two girls were at a harborside cafe. The six of us drank pastis till sunset and switched to wine. I don't remember those girls names or the ride home to Carnet-Plage, but I woke in bed alone. A lucky man.

After a week Walter, Nick, and I bid 'au revoir' to the Brials. Olivier was staying home. Les Americains auto-routed north to Paris. We slept in the car till Avignon. Leaving the South of France.

Paris was a different France, especially for the 17th ranked tennis player in America.

Opening paragraphs of ALMOST A DEAD MAN

Hamburg 1982

The scurry of claws across the filthy floor startled the woman on the battered chair and she lifted her black stiletto heels in horror. Rats were the least of her problems. Over the phone her lover had suggested a nocturnal rendezvous on Kaiserkai. No one came to Hamburg’s harbor at night. The woman had driven down to the warehouse district alone for rough sex with her Willi. Instead two men had been waiting on the unlit dock and dragged her into an abandoned warehouse. Now in a damp basement she pleaded, “Please let me go, I haven’t done anything wrong?”

"Nothing wrong?” The black man in the spotless jogging suit circled the chair. Aviator sunglasses hid his eyes. He swatted the dusty 40-watt bulb dangling from the rafter, then tapped the woman’s gaunt face.

“Are you a saint?”

“No, I am far from a saint.” The expensive wig flopped onto a folded lap.

"Saints are only saints, because they are dead. You on the other hand are alive, because you are a sinner."

Hamburg
>Howaldtswerke Deutsche Werft (HDW) Hamburg,
1972

I wrote this novel in the autumn of 1997 while living several months in Ballyconeeley under the Connemara Mountains or the Seven Pins. I returned to New York and only showed the finished work to Shannon Greer. He read it in one night. I never showed it to anyone else, although in 2016 I revised it another time.

Last Christmas Winick Diamonds, the jewelry sore in Montauk, closed for the season. With no job I went on the hustle for money and filled my spare time writing a new version of ALMOST A DEAD MAN. I'm nearly finished. First destination. Shannon Greer. He's a great photographer and has a better than good eye.

ps Calle Schwensen survived the Gross Freiheit of the Reeperbahn.

If you find him there, give him my regards.

Hamburg 1982

The scurry of claws across the filthy floor startled the woman on the battered chair and she lifted her black stiletto heels in horror. Rats were the least of her problems. Over the phone her lover had suggested a nocturnal rendezvous on Kaiserkai. No one came to Hamburg’s harbor at night. The woman had driven down to the warehouse district alone for rough sex with her Willi. Instead two men had been waiting on the unlit dock and dragged her into an abandoned warehouse. Now in a damp basement she pleaded, “Please let me go, I haven’t done anything wrong?”

"Nothing wrong?” The black man in the spotless jogging suit circled the chair. Aviator sunglasses hid his eyes. He swatted the dusty 40-watt bulb dangling from the rafter, then tapped the woman’s gaunt face.

“Are you a saint?”

“No, I am far from a saint.” The expensive wig flopped onto a folded lap.

"Saints are only saints, because they are dead. You on the other hand are alive, because you are a sinner."

Hamburg
>Howaldtswerke Deutsche Werft (HDW) Hamburg,
1972

I wrote this novel in the autumn of 1997 while living several months in Ballyconeeley under the Connemara Mountains or the Seven Pins. I returned to New York and only showed the finished work to Shannon Greer. He read it in one night. I never showed it to anyone else, although in 2016 I revised it another time.

Last Christmas Winick Diamonds, the jewelry sore in Montauk, closed for the season. With no job I went on the hustle for money and filled my spare time writing a new version of ALMOST A DEAD MAN. I'm nearly finished. First destination. Shannon Greer. He's a great photographer and has a better than good eye.

ps Calle Schwensen survived the Gross Freiheit of the Reeperbahn.

If you find him there, give him my regards.

As for Kurt he never left Paris.

American Friend - 1976 - Wim Wenders

Last night I watched Wim Wenders AMERICAN FRIEND 1976. I hadn't seen it in almost a half- century. Six years later as a semi -fugitive from New York I ended up there working at. nightclub BSIRs. Back then the DJ Henri Flesh and I roamed the city looking for the film's locations. I'm presently rewriting my 1997 unpublished novel ALMOST A DEAD MAN set in Hamburg. Very noir about a black Reeperbahn pimp, a dominatrix and an Irish thug. I haven't ever been back to Hamburg, as my life there was more like then Art. Still it was good to see the Elbe and 1976. Great film with. Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper.

On Criterion

ALMOST A DEAD MAN - CHAPTER 3 - 1982

THREE

The summer solstice sun was falling through the trees. The nature-park north of Hamburg was dead still. The approaching evening heightened the darkness within the corridor of tall pines. A rutted dirt road led deep into the new forest. No sign on the rusting wrought-iron gate said to where. A crumbling stone wall surrounded the property. Electronic sensors, video cameras, attack dogs roaming the grounds, and armed guards had once guarded the Von Hausen state from the Baader-Meinhof Gang's reign of terror in the 1970s.

1982 was a different story. The revolutionaries were dead, serving prison sentences, or in exile in East Germany or Libya. A low profile had served Germany's uncrowned aristocracy as the best defense against the masses. A wild swath of brush, brambles, and thorn trees within the estate's walls acted a barrier between the road and the estate's gardens. Flickering torches led to a Nineteenth-Century mansion. Laughter echoed over the neglected rose gardens, where the partygoers drank champagne and ate foie gras with a grace passed through blood.

The men appeared powerful and the wives looked ten years younger than their real age. The facial and physical uniformity was the result of centuries of interbreeding. Teenagers in chic outfits danced to Dexy's COME ON, EILEEN around the crumbling fountain. Exquisite girls undulated sinuously, while the blasé boys shrugged from side to side. Behind the twin turntables Bertram Bellepas was dying to dance with several of the female guests, despite Kurt, the owner of Hamburg’s most popular nightclub, having warned against fraternization with the upper classes.

These people preferred for the help to stay in place and the older set viewed the nightclub parvenu with all the suspicion the rich hold for someone ascending from the lower class. Few could understand their host’s association with such the nightclub owner, to whom the aristocrat simply referred to as the 'entertainment'.

Hamburg was a small city for a population of 1,600,000, especially in the nightlife. The two men had met countless times at parties, concert, and clubs. The baron had maintained a healthy disdain for the parvenu. Some people are the help.

Last year Lukas Von Brucken’s had inherited his title to discover his late father had ravaged the fortune as revenge against his only son's youthful rebellion. His inheritance had withered to an antiquated steel mill completely indebted to the banks and enough money for a two year holiday in Gstaad and Mallorca. His destitution was no one's business, which was why he threw this party tonight. It was one thing to be bankrupt and quite another to look pleite or broke.

His young wife skated through the crowd a goddess on silver stiletto heels. A shimmering silk sheath molded to her tanned skin. Her silver-blonde hair cast an unearthly halo around her angelic face. THe marriage to a man over twenty years her senior and the antithesis to her ingenuous purity had mystified everyone.

Lukas' thinning hair and the mottled flesh were the penalty from drug abuse. His bright smile was a smirk of decaying teeth. Considering how hard the baron had lived throughout the Sixties and Seventies, his achieving forty-two years amazed no one more than himself.

Vanessa Von Hausen greeted Lucas with a kiss on the cheek. If he was capable of pity, then he might have felt pity for her marrying him, instead he kissed her cheek, consummately acting the role of a loving husband.

“Having a good time, darling?”

"Lots of fun. Come dance with me," his wife whispered in her ear, touching a red spot on his shirt.

His grimace confirmed another meeting with Petra Wessel, Hamburg’s premier dominatrix. A spot of blood stained his shirt and she withdrew her hand, as if his masochism was as contagious as the Plague, when priests led around flagellants to purge the pestilence from Europe.

For his part Lukas' savored Vanessa's naive revulsion.

”Dancing is best left for the young in body and heart. You’ll have more fun with Kurt.”

“I’d rather dance with you.” Vanessa still prayed for his salvation, but turned her turquoise blue eyes on Kurt Oster. His criminality lured her pure soul and she motioned to him to meet nightclub owner on the dance floor. Many of guests scrutinized their host to gauge his reaction and Lukas might have warned Vanessa to be more discreet, but their falling in love was all part of a grand plan to fend off financial ruin.

Vanessa swayed back and forth, her belly grazing Kurt's thigh. Silky strands rippled across her spine like a theater curtain closing on the stage and the lengthy gold necklace swung between her compact breasts. The melting scent of her perfume wafted in the night air. Feeling the hard nipples shift across his chest, Kurt almost kissed her, then stepped back from his partner.

Surveying the partygoers' faces, he recognized many from newspapers and magazines as the upper echelon of Northern Germany. Most were capable of reciting their lineage into the Middle Ages as opposed to Kurt’s obscure peasant roots. Their families controlled riches beyond imagination, while his wealth originated from any number of semi-legal schemes, but their fortune had not come through pious acts. Murder, theft, mistreatment of workers, pollution, and poisoning the food supply were just a few of their crimes. They were no better than him and he whispered to Vanessa, "One day soon I will take you away from all this."

"Do not talk like that." She looked around to see, if anyone might have overheard him.

“Why? I’m not worried about what these people think. They only have money, because they either were born rich, married someone rich, or stole it.”

As the stepson of a Hafenstrasse butcher his birth had excluded a 'silver spoon in the mouth' and Germany's complicated laws of inheritance protected any true redistribution through marriage. The only way to achieve his dream was by robbing from the rich to give to the poor and he held Vanessa tighter.

"You do not love Lukas and he does not love you"

“How can you say that?” Vanessa was flushed with excitement. Up to this moment their flirtations had been only a tease.

“You think I associate with these people to get ahead? They hate me and everyone like me. Your husband as well. I only serve a purpose.” His hand slipped down her back and then they danced in a dizzying circle. “You must know how I feel about you and I think you feel the same way too. I am working on something to change both our lives and then I will ask you to leave behind all this all. Somewhere in your heart you will find a way to say, "Yes."

Vanessa snapped back her head. She was married. Her life belonged to Lukas, though she demanded without any conviction, “Stop.”

"Why?" Kurt sidestepped around her, then pulled Vanessa tight like an Apache dancer. “You want it as much as me."

The song ended and they broke their embrace. Vanessa’s face turned a scarlet red, as Bertram segued into LE FREAK. The international disco hit by Chic launched the young dancers into a frenzy. On the terrace Lukas clapped his hands in feigned delight and waved for his wife to come over. Once she was next to him, he put his arm lovingly around her and asked, "What did Kurt say to you?"

She paused for a second, attempting to conjure a lie, only her upbringing demanded nothing, but the truth. "Kurt wants to take me away."

"Oh, don't they all, my dear? What else did he say?"

"That he had something big planned that could change everything for him."

"What? Like rob a bank?" There was nothing more pathetic or more vulnerable than a lower-class fool in love with their better like they believed in fairy tales. Vanessa lowered her head.

"He did not say."

"Of course he will not." Lukas kissed his wife on the cheek and cautioned like a concerned husband, "You should stay away from Kurt. He is trouble."

"Thank you for the warning." Vanessa was trapped playing the princess in a diabolical fairy tale, but knew her role well. She was studying fairy tales for a master’s program in literature at Hamburg University. Lukas' family owned the both editions of the 1812 Grimms’ Fairy Tales. They really weren’t meant for children or the naive. "If there is anything I have learned from you, it is that no man is harmless."

“And few women too.”

Lukas walked away, as tears formed in her eyes. Only one woman satisfied his libido and he should have married Petra, except his titled prejudices forbid such a luxury.

Lukas entered the library stood before the monumental 32-volume dictionary of the German language started by the Grimms Brothers and completed in 1961. So much effort for nothing. Only a few thousand copies had been sold, since few people were wealthy enough to afford a full set. His father had bought thousands of books and those never read crowded the library's shelves. Lukas had upheld the tradition by occasionally holding them, as if the sentences, paragraphs, and chapters could be absorbed through osmosis, though not a word passed through the covers to his hand.

Vanessa had come into his life with her research of how fairy tales role define good and evil in western culture. lost in these old books like a Cinderella trapped in a tower. Not only the Grimms brothers, but was easily enthralled by classics E. T. A. Hoffmann he Nutcracker and the Mouse King or Nussknacker, Das kalte Herz by Wilhelm Hauf und Mausekönig and Johann Gustav Gottlieb Büsching, Puddocky. He had become not so much smitten, but bewitched by her innocenct belief that these tales formed our morality. He had remained a gentleman and listened and laughed with her interpretations of humanity.

Lukas regarded books as dusty reminders of the past and his entire life had evolved into a series of remaking the movies he loved; DARLING, SUNSET BOULEVARD, INFANTS DE PARADIS, SALO, and most lately Jean Renoir's black-and-white version of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.

Lukas slammed his fist against the wall. He had been tricked by an addendum to his father's will that the inheritance was null, unless he married. The old man had been mad enough to imagine that his sacramental union with a girl as pure as Vanessa might rescue his soul from damnation. He often fantasized about disinterring his father's corpse for the animals in the forest to scavenge, except his designs of destruction were meant only for the living.

Lukas envisioned himself reincarnated as a dissolute noble in Visconti's THE DAMNED, reveling in the cinematic daydream. The door to the library opened for his secret guest. Lukas motioned for SS Tommy to take a chair. Few of the partygoers knew Cali's right-hand man and Lukas shut the shades, while SS Tommy warily sat in a rich leather chair. The blonde pimp had met Lukas Von Hausen at several clandestine meetings for a neo-Nazi movement. He considered the Count a soft believer, since he was Oberklasse, a drug addict, a homosexual, and now a S&M slave to Petra Wessel, whose dead eye tracked SS Tommy whenever they were in the same room.

As much as he hated the aristocrat, the Party was in no position to exclude members, especially one whose family as well-connected as the Von Hausens, but come the revolution, Lukas was destined to be put up against the wall with the other race traitors, so the Fifth Reich avoided the same mistakes of the Third Reich.

"You didn't invite me here for a social chat, so what do you want?"

"Besides a united Germany, what is your fondest dream?"

"To be King of the Reeperbahn,"

"What if I could help that dream come true?" Lukas' original purpose in attending neo-Nazi meetings had been to incense his father, except the old bastard approved of their politics. Lukas continued associating with this motley organizations in case the connection might come in handy one day and today was that day.

"You? How can you help me?"

"Who stands in your way? Ein Schwartzer in such a position. Cali. It has come to my attention that Cali and Kurt Oster have something in the works. Something that might help both you and me, if we were to interfere."

"What?" SS Tommy smiled, for the mention of Kurt's name confirmed the rumors about the nightclub owner’s affair with Vanessa Von Hausen.

"That is still their secret, but I have a way of finding out."

Taking on SS Tommy as a partner was as risky as grabbing an egg from a snake hole, yes a partnership was a danger he was willing to risk, because while a snake bit any hand stuck in the hole, no one said Lukas had to be the one snatching the egg.

"Du verarscht mich. I'm no sucker." SS Tommy crossed the room and seized the baron by his lapels.

"No one said you were,” Lukas answered without struggling. The pimp had swallowed his bait. "I have a man following Kurt. Who is not important, but he is very good. When he tells me any new information, I will tell you. Are you in or not?"

"If I find out you have been lying to me in any way, I will kill you."

"I hope you find that unnecessary." Lukas flipped his arm against the pimp's wrists, freeing himself. His right arm slipped around the pimp's throat in a classic shime-waza or chokehold at the city’s premier Judo dojo. "You may think me a weak man, but if you want to better yourself, then stop playing the strong man with me."

Lukas tightened his pressure.. Another five seconds and the pimp dropped to the floor unconscious. He released SS Tommy, who sat in a chair coughing convulsively.The Count slapped him on the back.

"Breathe slowly and the pain will go away faster."

"I underestimated you."

The taller man had him in a death grip a few seconds ago

"Many people think I am my reputation. The don't know the real me and as I said we can help each other.

"When would this all happen?"

"Maybe a month. Maybe two."

"Will it cost me any money?"

"Only time and your special talents." Lukas adjusted his jacket, strangely aroused by the confrontation. SS Tommy’s thick finger pointed at the baron, trying to regain some bravado.

"Remember. If you fuck with me...."

"You will kill me." Worst things might happen than SS Tommy’s threats and Lukas calmly said, “So are we in agreement?”

The blonde pimp nodded and the two men shook hands.

Lukas opened the door. "You'll understand, if I ask you to leave by the back."

"No offense taken," SS Tommy fantasized about paying back this sleight and walked through the woods to his car parked on the nature park’s road. .

SS Tommy drove his Ferrari out of the estate, rubbing his throat. King of the Reeperbahn appealed to him, not because of money. He had more than he needed as well as every woman in the Eroscenter. His base desire the power to strike back at everyone who had ever stood in his way. The list was topped by Cali, because 'King of the Reeperbahn’ even sounded better once SS Tommy ruled the street.

ALMOST A DEAD MAN - CHAPTER 2

Howling sirens drove the panicked East Villagers into the Astor Place Subway. Most failed to pierce the scrum at the head of the stairs to the station and they raised their eyes to the speck falling to Earth. A white flash vaporized New York into the ionosphere.

“DOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNAAAAAAA."

The subhuman scream ping-ponged up the canyon of East 10th Street tenements. Inside the third-floor railroad flat’s bedroom a man’s naked body twitched on the floor futon. An arm over his face failed to block out the madman's wail and the thirty year-old tossed off the damp sheet to jump out of the bed. The blood drained from his skull and he collapsed toward the window. The temperature was climbing into the 90s. All June had been hot since his return from Paris. Outside a middle-aged Polish woman fled down the sidewalk from a dope-sick junkie mauling a parked car with an iron pipe. Sparkling fragments flew in the sunlight. Sean’s motorcycle was a single car-length from this psycho-storm. Down below the madman arched his face to the broiling sun and emptied the ashes of his soul.

"DOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNAAAAAAA."

No woman answered his two-syllable aria. A cop car rounded the corner. The madman stood erect and waved to the officers. His good posture masked his mania Nothing short of an 'officer-down' call was extricating the policemen from their air-con cruiser. With the cruiser out of sight the junkie demolished another windshield.

His Yamaha 650XS was on deck for batting practice. Sean rushed to fill a trash bag with water from the brimming tub in his kitchen to save his motorcycle. Quickly aiming, he heaved the heavy plastic sack out the window. Liquid beads sprayed from its rupturing seams. Ten pounds of water accelerated from forty feet and the impact leveled his target to the sidewalk.

The torn plastic shroud flapped over the flattened man. Water dropped from that height could be fatal. Sean reached for the phone to call 911. As the phone rang, the madman staggered to his feet off in the directions of Tompkins Square Park. It was hard to kill junkies. There were no witnesses on the street. He hung up the phone.

Sean flopped on the living room couch. The floor fan pushed sullen air around the living room. Sweat ran down his body like he was a martyred saint’s miraculous weeping statue. The madman had only been a menace to property and his Yamaha XS 650 wasn’t worth a life. Every psychiatrist and girlfriend had blamed his violent streak on his childhood. His parents had provided him everything necessary to be normal and he tried to examine his past for the millionth time to discover what set him apart from everyone else. Dyslexia, bullying, and speech impediments were clue to a mystery not yet solved and now these dreams of nuclear destruction.

He lay on the battered sofa. Seconds swelled to minutes and the hours thickened until a tainted breeze from the distant Hudson stirred heat-swollen air. Sheet lightning crackled across the sky and the thunder echoed the rumbling of the nine-pin balls from Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Nobody read him anymore.

The WINS radio reported not a hint rain ahead to relieve the overheated city. He shut off the radio and slipped into the tub in the kitchen. It had been full for several days.The water wrapped around his body like a discharged placenta.

After the murder at the Continental in the winter of 1982 Sean had fled New York. Lisa had sworn to meet him in Paris. A week later heard from a friend that she had gone to LA to get into the movies. He didn’t blame her for not coming to France, but she was always on his mind. His fingers wrinkled after twenty minutes. They were ready to become thirty. The ringing of the telephone broke his trance. He leaped from the bath and grabbed the phone on the third ring.

It was an oversea call. Lisa wasn’t on the other end. A German was.

"This is Kurt Oster. You remember me?" A man's voice crackled over trans-Atlantic connection.

"Who can forget Paris?" The German possessed a jet set life of multiple-city dwellings, cars, and beautiful women. Sean had translated some documents for his teletype business in his second-story house on Rue Des Deux Pont. Kurt liked when asked if he needed anything Sean had requested champagne. He served him Moet. It was 10am. They had done drugs together more than a few times. The two of them were acquaintances more than friends.

“Sure, I remember you.”

A puddle of water spread beyond his bare feet. He wrapped a towel around his waist and sat on a kitchen chair. Outside in the alley the willow branches were still in the breathless heat.

"New York in the summer. Hell, no?"

"Pretty close to it. Only me, the poor, the depraved, and the dying."

"You speak a little German, yes."

His high school class had ridiculed Sean’s reading of Kafka's DAS URTEIL, until the warty Bavarian teacher had snubbed out his Pall Mall.

"Herr Coll's accent is better than the rest of you hairdressers."

Sean had a lisp and a stutter as a young man. He didn’t even speak English well. "Ein bissen."

"You are Irish, yes?" This was an interview.

"Irish and American." That nation had granted second-generation blood citizenship in both Ireland and the EEC.

"Good, because you need papers to work at my new club in Hamburg. Your friend, Bertram Bellepas, will be the DJ. You know him.”

“Yes.” They had worked together in Paris.He was almost a friend. As much a ny junkie can be a friend.

“The city is beautiful in the summer. The women more so. It’s the summer solstice and the days are long. I will pay you a thousand Deutschmarks a week, plus a one and a half percentage of the gross, which I figure about two-thousand marks a month. If you agree, a ticket will be waiting at Lufthansa. I will meet you at the Hamburg airport. It will be summertime and the living is sleazy.”

Sean had seen the city in Wim Wenders AMERICAN FRIEND, the film-noir 1977 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s RIPLEY’S GAME. It looked dangerous, but the name also conjured up the Beatles at the Star Club, a vast harbor on the North Sea, and sex trade on the Reeperbahn. Working six months came to roughly fifty thousand marks or roughly $30,000.

"Ich musste uber es zu denken."

“What’s there to think about?”

Sean’s savings from working the winter at a Paris nightclub were down to a couple of hundred dollars. Rent was due on the first of July. There was only one reason to stay here and Lisa had been gone over six months, still Sean answered, "I'll tell you tomorrow."

"You'd be making a big mistake not to come. Here’s my number.”

Sean wrote it down. “Tschus.”

Sean said the same. It was more familiar than Auf Siedersehen. The line went dead.

He had not expected fate to provide a salvation in Hamburg. At worst Bruder Karl had to be smiling in heaven at the prospect of his worst student working in Germany. Hopefully his classmates were destined for hell. They all had been Tyrannen or bullies, except for the one black student in the class. For some reason they left him alone, which was inexplicable in a Boston suburb. The long summer's day surrendered to night without any temperature drop. It was the solstice and the was setting at the western terminus of 10th Street.Sean got on the Yahama and drove up 1st Avenue to East 77th Street. He parked the bike on the corner and walked halfway down the block. The windows of the third-floor apartment across the street were dark. Lisa's name remained on the mailbox and last week the building super had said her rent had been paid in full for three months. She had to show up some time. A bottle whistled by his head.

"Bastard. Man. Bastard."

A wizened woman in shredded plastic bags searched the garbage for another missile.

"I'm the only crazy on this block. You're not crazy. You're only in love with a woman who left you for another man and she’s never coming back. You don't think I see you, because I'm nobody, but I've seen you and your whore. You didn’t lose your girlfriend. Just your turn. She was fucking that Russian and everyone else. All you bastards want is for us to be whores, and when we’re not your mothers, then you throw us out on the street.”

He had seen the old woman many times. He sometimes gave her a dollar. Her name was Estelle. She never told her story and never had a kind word for anyone. He expected no less. The old woman tore apart her plastic sheath. Her skin was caked with rivulets of sweat. He returned to his motorcycle. The kickstart ignited the 650cc engine with a flaming backfire. Dogs barking joined the howl of car alarms. He revved the motor and raced up the block to 2nd Avenue.

Only one thing was capable of erasing the old woman’s accusations. He burned the next red light. A newspaper truck missed him by inches. It was just a question of time, until an impact with steel car exorcised his obsession with Lisa.

At 23rd Street he broke free of the traffic flow and shifted into fifth gear. At this speed any crash was fatal. At 14th a redhead the same height as Lisa was getting into a taxi. Sean braked and swerved to a halt. A man in a suit ran up and lifted the young redhead’s skirt. She laughed, while he forced her into a taxi.

The yellow Checker pulled away from the curb. Sean blasted through the red light in pursuit. A siren whooped behind him. The redhead turned and Lisa's mirage dissolved into another woman’s face. No cop in the New York would believe his having seen his ex-girlfriend’s double, but running from the police was always a bad idea, unless he had a few day’s head start.

Sean veered to a stop at the curb and pulled off his helmet. Two car doors slammed and cop shoes flapped against the pavement. A flashlight beam blinded his vision. A gruff voice ordered, "Get off the bike."

"What's the problem, officers?” Sean balanced his bike on the kickstand and lifted his hands.

"You see what I see, Kev?"

"I can't friggin' believe my eyes. Sean Coll in the flesh."

"I told you that was his bike, but you said, "Naw, Seano's out of town.” Guess you were wrong," the tobacco-harsh voice commented with the pleasure of being right.

The flashlight shut off and Sean blinked away the sunbursts. The two NYPD officers grinned like drunken hunters discovering a snared animal. Kevin Driscoll was thinner than his partner, but still had forty pounds and a few inches on Sean. Neither cop was shy about tossing around their weight.

They were the pride of the 9th Precinct. The setting for the TV show KOJAK. Nothing on that show snitched out these two cops’ crimes.

"Welcome back, Seano." deRocco took off his perforated summer-weight cap and scratched his balding head. “We heard you were in Paris. You shoulda stayed out of town."

"I'm leaving as soon as I can." Sean had not counted on deRocco and Driscoll. They were as lucky as he was unhappy that they were still in uniform.

"You believe that, Kev?" deRocco was the brains of the pair.

"Nah, it's bullshit." Kevin Driscoll waved on the gawking drivers and deRocco stepped closer. The whiskey heavy on his breath never a good sign in hot weather. "Drop yer fuckin' hands. This ain't no arrest. We just wanna talk with you."

"I haven't talked to no one about the night Johnny Fats was killed."

"Why should we believe you?" Driscoll slapped the flashlight into his palm.

One thin dime changed this balance of power.

"If I had ratted you out, would I be here now?”

“No, you would be in a grave.”

“A cop in jail isn't a pretty sight."

"You threatenin’ us?" Driscoll dropped his hand to his .38. The citations above his badge attested to multiple cold-blooded shootings in line of duty to the NYPD.

"Not at all.”

Seven months ago on a snowy evening Sean had discovered the precinct's bagman in the Caddy parked behind their after-hour club on East 14th Street. A single bullet hole perforated Johnny Fat’s left temple. A gun in his left hand. Johnny Fats was right-handed. Somehow a Grand Jury ruled it 'death by misadventure'. The ensuing IAU investigation suspended fifteen cops from the Twentieth Precinct. Two were in upstate prisons serving long term for various crimes. None of them murder. No one had all the answers to the whys and whos. Sean possessed more than most.

“Just I saw you leave with Johnny Fats.”

"We weren’t involved with his death." Driscoll protested, not knowing what if anything the bagman had said to Sean.

"Shut up, Kev." deRocco's eyes were blank of emotion. “We came back before he was offed."

"Sgt. Ferguson thinks that piece of timing is a little off." The IAU sergeant had plenty of theories, mostly of them unprovable hunches on the money.

"That cocksucker." deRocco spat out the words.

Sean smirked, having heard the precinct cops gossip about deRocco's sexual leaning. They had once been staking out of dope drop on East 4th Street. Te gang member made them and approached the unmarked car. They discovered two men engaged in a sexual act. Queer had saved both their lives.

"What you smilin' about?"

"Nothing." Cops had a hard job in New York City, however these two were well past redemption. AS lucky as they had been, bad luck was waiting for the, but not tonight. “Today I got a phone call today from Germany. They offered a job at a nightclub there. Maybe I should go?” “And stay away for a while too.” deRocco lit a cigarette. "You're a lucky fuckin' Mick, Seano."

"You want to contribute to my bon-voyage fund?"

Driscoll feigned a punch and Sean ducked to his right.

“Don’t push it, Seano. Consider yourself another asshole from Boston who lived in New York too long. Just get the fuck out of town. You have three days.”

"Sure, I'll send you a postcard. Ich liebe dich.” The two officers returned to their blue-and-white cruiser, and then u-turned across 14th Street into the Ninth Precinct. Sean had to face the truth that he had come back to the scenes of the crimes, because of his love for Lisa. Thousands of other women lived in this city. Falling in love with one seemed cursed by his obsession with Lisa. She was not coming back any time soon. Of this he was sure.

Sean obeying all the lights back to his apartment.

By the time he reached East 10th Street, he thanked deRocco and Driscoll for forcing him to accept Kurt's offer. Maybe a life a few thousand miles away from New York might free his soul. Something had to someday.

Photo (th Precinct Investigation Unit 1979

Almost A Dead Man - Chapter 1

ONE

The damp scurry of claws across the floor startled the woman on the battered chair and she lifted her black stiletto heels in horror. Rats were the least of her problems. Over the phone her lover had suggested a nocturnal rendezvous in Hamburg’s harbor district. The woman had expected rough sex. Instead two men had been waiting in the disused warehouse. Now in a damp basement she pleaded, “Please let me go, I haven’t done anything wrong?”

"Nothing wrong?” The black man in the spotless jogging suit circled the chair. Aviator sunglasses hid his eyes. He swatted the 40-watt bulb dangling from the rafter, then tapped the woman’s gaunt face.

“Are you a saint?”

“No, I am far from a saint.” The expensive wig flopped onto a folded lap.

“These are very arty.” The muscled interrogator slapped a set of grainy photos. “I can’t see that you are a man and your friend’s skin almost is as white as ivory in black and white. Very good composition.”

“They are only souvenirs.” The thirty-two year old banker shivered in the slick plastic dress. He had dressed for sex, not an interrogation by Hamburg’s most notorious pimp.

“Expensive souvenirs, nicht war?” A private collector might pay $20 for the explicit photos. They were worth much more to the right people.

“Yes, they are.” The wicked weekend in a St. Pauli hotel had cost over 2000 Deutschmarks or half his monthly salary. The photos’ cheap thrill had failed to satisfy his desires and Hans had raided various accounts within the bank to supplement his perversions for the past two months. He had yet to add up how much.

“And now you are in trouble.” The black man was as tired as his vicious role as any actor performing Hamlet for the ten-thousandth time. Still his audience flinched on cue, when he dropped the lurid snapshots on the man's skirted lap.

“You know who I am, yes?”

"You are Cali Nordstrum." The newspapers regularly featured stories about the pimps. Only last week he had escaped a murder attempt. The police had no leads on the identity of the failed assassin. The list of suspects ran into the hundreds.

"Stop your sniffling. Some of my best friends are Transvestis and Schwules.” Cali backed away and his scarred black face melted into the gloom. “We are not here to hurt you or blackmail you, but because my best hustler has fallen for you."

"Es tut mir lied." The transvestite buried his veiny hands in the fake hair like a muff. "All I want is to protect Willi. I can pay you."

"I am not running a marriage service for the Huren or Husen of the Reeperbahn.” Cali lunged forward like a cobra and the man on the stool toppled backwards. The pimp caught his arm. "Maybe I'll send Willi away.”

"Not that." A high heel slipped off his foot. "I will do whatever you ask.”

“Whatever?” Cali kicked the shoe into the corner.

Two months ago his best rentboy had mentioned a cross-dressing client bragging about paying for sex with pilfering funds from a leading bank. The pimp related the Kalbflesch's story to his partner in crime, who suggested that the hustler discover his lover’s actual position in the bank. Several days later Willi Stief learned Hans Roth oversaw money transfers throughout the Europe. Cali advised the hustler to fall in love with the banker. A month of delightful deceit led Hans Roth to this basement. There was only one way out and Cali crouched by the chair. "Do you have an open mind?"

For ten years Hans had protected his name, job, and family from disgrace. Liaisons with street boys lasted one night. Sex with Willi had incarnated his true persona and he asked hopefully, "Why?"

"First, you are woman trapped in a man's body. Second, Willi is too expensive for your salary,” Cali explained, because most people required more than one motive to cross the line from good to bad.

“Finally you have been stealing money you can never repay to the bank."

“Willi told you everything.” Tears seeped from Han’s eyes.

"Only because we can help each other." Cali mapped out his scheme with the persuasiveness of an airline ticket salesman selling the last helicopter seat at the Fall of Saigon. “This is a chance to get enough money for you and Willi. No one will think of searching for you in Thailand. Not as a woman. Were you lying about your commitment to Willi?"

"No." The man’s Adam’s apple gulped in hope. The desperate always bet on long shots.

"Your first name is Hans, yes?"

"I prefer Greta."

"Greta, I am a better friend than enemy. You can contact me at this number in an emergency. Tell Willi nothing. This is 'our' secret." He handed the banker a wad of 100-DM notes. "Give him this slowly. It will come out of your cut later."

“I’ll follow your every command.” His hand reached for the money and Cali snatched the man’s ear so hard that the cartilage partially snapped from the skull. A butcher at the city slaughterhouse had taught him the trick. The ear staying on Hans’ head was not a sign of weakness. This had only been a warning.

"Greta, you understand there's no backing out?"

"Yes," Hans said through watery eyes and Cali released him.

“What else?"

"Thank you.” The young man arranged his wig. He had started wearing dresses after playing with his sister’s dolls. The material was softer than his trousers and shirts. Lingerie on a man was not a sin. Only a forbidden nocturnal pleasures with Willi.

"Thank me, when this is all over." Cali nodded and his friend opened the basement door for a young black leather angel with bleached white hair. Willi was pretty, although heroin had got the better of his youth. The black pimp hated drugs. They cut into productivity. His associates became sloppy. Mistakes cost time, money, and lives in his business.

The banker was blind to Willi’s deterioration. They embraced as man and woman. They boith had earned privacy.

“Let’s leave the lovers alone.”

Neither his friend nor he needed to witness the hustler’s performance. On the stairway Kurt Oster pulled out a cigarette. The flame from a gold lighter illuminated a rugged face.

"Are we really going to cut him in?”

"Just because we are criminals doesn't mean we have to be dishonest." In the beginning it was always luckier to believe no one was going to get hurt. “Everyone will get what they deserve. I’ll see to that.”

He climbed from the basement. He hated the the smoke. Cigarettes killed thousands of people every year. The police never arrested the manufacturers. Persecuting the pimps made better headlines. Sex and crime sold well for the Hamburger Morgenblatt.

From the warehouse loading dock he surveyed the street. Only three cars were in sight. None were running and no one sat behind the wheel. It was a hot night for June.

“Anything wrong?” Kurt flicked the cigarette at his shadow on the cobblestones.

“Someone is out there.” He felt eyes on him everywhere.

“No one comes to the harbor at night.”

The two walked to Cali’s 1982 Mercedes-Benz 380SL.

“We did.”

Cali’s premonitions were his early radar warning.

“And we haven’t done anything wrong.”

Kurt’s reddish hair had been cut two days ago in Milan. The jean jacket came from World’s End, a punk s on the King’s Road and the gold-buckled loafers were from GUcci in Milan. Only one shop in Paris carried 501 jeans. Kurt drove a 1961 Thunderbird. He had purchased after seeing Wim Wender’s AMERICAN FRIEND. He had expensive tastes in women too.

“Yet?” Cali spoke German, ate sausages, liked Schlager rock. His black skin condemned that he was an Auslander to nearly every German, except one person and that person wasn’t his mother. Kurt and he had been friends from a tough childhood on Hafenstrasse by the Elbe.

“Which is why I have an American for the Sonderboch.” German police loved arresting international criminals. “Someone from Hamburg might suspect something, but the American nothing.”

“Is he stupid?” A sucker to hold the bag might buy them a few hours’ head start, if things went bad.

"No, worse. Broken-hearted."

"Ach." Nothing blinded a man more completely than love. Kurt added another missing ingredient.

"Plus Petra will act as the lure."

"Are you mad? She is dangerous.”

"The greater the risk, the greater the gain.”

"Just once I would like someone to lie to me." Cali held no illusion about this enterprise ending in failure. The State severely punished bank robbery. His associates imposed the death penalty.

“I’ve never lied to you.”

“Not once?” His Swiss bank account he’d enough to finance flight, but not in Europe.

“Not about anything important.” Kurt was overextended to several loansharks. The money from this robbery was all he needed to get the woman of his dreams and she had been chosen from the stars.

“You don’t want to do this, I understand.”

“I didn’t say that.”

Last week Cali had exited from Cuneo,a Italian restaurant off the Reeperbahn. A 5-DM coin lay in the gutter. He had been raised poor and bent over to pick up the Sechser. An unseen gunman pumped five shots over his head from a BMW. He saw the face in the car. Cali had never seen before seen the man. He had many enemies.

The next day he had ordered a Jurnfernstieg jeweler to dip the lucky piece in gold for a medallion. The preceding King of the Reeperbahn had died in his bed, because a rival had stabbed him in the heart. He had been thirty-six. Leaving a good-looking corpse was the goal of a fool.

“I could use a long holiday and stealing millions isn’t any different from stealing an apple. The trick is not getting caught.”

"At least not by the wrong people." Neither were worried about the police. A score like this one attracted another kind of trouble.

Kurt’s daydream upset Cali. His friend should have been concentrating on the job ahead, instead of another man’s wife. He popped open the trunk of the Benz. Cali loved the new car smell. He reached into the trunk's secret compartment and handed over a manila envelope.

“That enough money?”

"For now it is.” The thickness was more than enough to open an account in Switzerland. Within one month it will grow into several million Deutschmarks. One plus one sometimes equal more than two, but that equation needed a few more people.

“Never.” Kurt tucked the envelope inside his jacket. People feared them, but no one offered them respect. Millions changed their opinions.

Cali was placing his life in his friend’s hand again. They had grown up on the docks. Neither of them had known their fathers. Maybe Kurt might now pass for Mittel-Klasse, but pimps and whores were Cali’s life. Few of his fellow 'Zuhalterei' had completed high school.

SS Tommy, his right-hand man, oversaw their control of half Hamburg's prostitutes with violence. The bodybuilder had paid cash for his Ferrari 308 GTSI. Mack 'Die Alte’, his enforcer, beat the rival pimps into submission. His recent investment in Pattaya’s go-go bars had earned him a fortune.

Cali’s fellow pimps understood the extreme measures necessary to control Hamburg's streetwalkers, part-time call girls, gay rent-boys, and underage 'Strichmadchens'. Fear was his greatest defense against their turning on the illegitimate son of a black US Army sergeant was an 'Auslander'. That and no mercy.

“This is me and you.”

“Against the world.”

“As always.” They shook hands to seal their childhood pact once again. He walked to his electric-blue 1960 T-bird, lost in the dream of a better world to come. Cali checked the street again. No one was there. No one he could see, but it paid to act, as if someone was there, because that way the unexpected came as no surprise.

May 29, 1982 - Paris - Journal

Stasi East Berlin 1982

In the autumn of 1982 the BSir's DJ Henri Flesh and I jetted from Hamburg to Berlin's Tempelhof aerport to see our friends from Helen Wheels play at a concert halle. We checked into a four-star hotel and toured the city. Of course the wall at Brandenburg Gate anda viewing from a raised platform of the Wall's death zone.

After the fall of the Thousand Year Reich, Stalin approved the Red Army's plunder of the Soviet zone, rippling the economy of the DDR, while the Marshall Plan spurred the growth of the Bundesrepublik. Millions fled the East, mostly through Berlin.In 1961 Erik Honneker the DDR's communist leader, instructed the army to erect a wall to stop the loss of workers. Many attempted to flee, few succeeded, and hundreds were shot by the security forces.

A long walk back to the Kurfurstdamm revealed the Porsche's resurrection from Hitler's Gottdammerung to a sparkling weltstadt offering the wealth of the Free World; Mercedes, Hugo Boss fashion, chocolate and the delights of the KaDeWe shopping mecca. The only sign of the War was the ruins of Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. That night after the concert we partied at the infamous Dzungel. Sex, drugs, dancing, as if no one expected to lived till tomorrow.

We slept from dawn till 11. A quick swim at our elegant Hotel. No fruhstuck of hard bread and cheese. Only black coffee.

The concierge asked where we were going and after I replied, "Ost Berlin."

He frowned and said, "Be careful. Because of the Pershing missiles, there is tension between the East and West."

"We're not spies." Reagan had authorized the deployment of these powerful, highly accurate missiles throughout West Germany. The Kremlin had retaliated with threats and the left of the Bundesrepublik protested this upbuild-up with marches on the streets. This was the frontier of the Cold war.

"Be careful. Speak to no one. You might not be spies, but everyone on the other side of the wall is a potential informer to Stasi." "Thanks for the warning." He handed in our keys and then taxied had to Checkpoint Charlie, the legendary crossing from West Berlin to East Berlin.

A burly DDR female border guard processed our passports. Her stocky build looked like she had been training for the 1984 Olympics as a men's shot putter. Henri whispered that she loved her, as we exchanged twenty-five BundesRepublik marks into East German currency. He was into big women.

The Parisian said nothing. As direct descendants of the Gestapo the Stasi were well known for their lack of humor.

Clearing the checkpoint the differences between the two Berlins was immediately apparent from the wastelands between bullet-pocked bukdings and the lack of parked cars. The desolation resembled the devastated Lower East Side of the 1970s. At least no buildings were on flames like the East Village.

"So we speak to no one." Henri meant women.

"Do what you want, but Stasi's informants numbered in the hundreds of thousands and reported on friends and families. The headquarters in Licthenberg holds the worn clothing of thousands of suspected anti-communists to aid specially trained dogs to run potential escapees from the DDR escapees. All in numbered in IDed glass jars."

"Les Boches toujours le meme." Henri's family had lived the occupation in Paris. After two wars feew French had any good to say about Germans.

A single Trabant puttered by sounding like an underpowered golf cart. The few pedestrians crossed the street to avoid any contact with us. None of them looked like Stasi, but informers are us. We avoided them on the way to the old Reichtag. It also bore scars of the War. Neither of us had a camera, which was a good thing, since several men were observing us with practiced neglect.

None of the stores had anything of interest and neither of us wanted to intrude to bother the owners, but both of us were thirsty and Henri suggested that we go to a bierkellar. We entered and all conversation ceased between the score of proelatarian workers. None of them stated us and kept their gaze at the table, especially after two men entered the bar. I ordered us two bier. One DDR DM. I told the bartender, "Zwei bier fur alleman." I put my money on the bar and pointed to the two Stasi to show that there was no hard feeling. They remained standing and no one left their chairs to grab a bier.

"Les Boches. Pas de change." Henri down his bier. I downed mine. I would have like another, but this wasn't the time. Henri tried to give away his oney of the way to Checkpoint Charlie. We ere like the plague. A danger. Even children knew enough to steer clear of westerners. Getting back to the border, Henri said, "One day they will be as free as us. Let's get some real beeer."

And that was all the freedom we needed in this world.

That an another city on the town.

Happy Birthday Lizzie Mercier Descloux 4/20

In 1982 I fled New York for Paris. Bernard Zekri hired me as the physionomiste of the Rex Club, which was under the vast Rex Theatre on the Gran Boulevard. The magazine ACTUEL wanted A Manhattan feel for the door. I knew Parisians and even less French. One night a diminutive female was a bird-nest coif spoke to me at the door. She I knew.

Lizzie Mercier Descloux. A singer.

After a few minutes she said, "I met you in New York."

"You did?"

"Yes, I came to the Jefferson Theater."

"Ah." I had a feeling where she was going. The club was after-hours and her eyes betrayed iwhatever I had done wasn't good.

"Yes, one night I was the bar and my friend started arguing with the bartender. You asked him to leave him out and I yelled at you. You asked me to leave and I wouldn't. You got me to the stairs and I grabbed hold of the railing. Somehow I ended up falling down the stairs. You remember that?"

"No."

Really?"

"No."

"Connard."

"Does that mean 'asshole' in French?"

"Quais.",

""Can I buy you a drink?"

You think you can make that night night by a drink?"

"Or two or three?" Weak drinks in Paris cost $20.

"Okay, connard."

I signaled the bouncers, two off-duty Legionaires that I was taking a break. Marcel winked, thinking I was taking on Lizzie to someplace discreet. My lips pursed in a 'moue'. Lizzie didn't see my pout, but the bouncers gave me a thumbs up.

I signaled the bartender to take care of Lizzie.

"Merci, connard," Lizzie said, as I returned to the door.

"Du rien," I replied and thought it wasn't so bad to be good sometimes. Just not all the time.

Happy Birthday Lizzie.

A day late, but a day late is nothiing in eternity from an old connard.

Hotel Des Ecouffes 1982

In the early 80s I often resided at a Marais hotel particular on Rue Des Ecouffes off the Rue Des Rosiers. The top floor offered a view of the rooftops and the bell towers of St. Gervais. As a true Shabbas Goy I loved waking to the gangs fighting on the street and the nearby Hamman or steam baths. The hotel owner, an old Jewish woman, always had a room for me.

Room 48

The top floor was graced with a view of the rooftops of the Marais.

During the Nazi occupation Mdme. Saar had hidden with her family of seven in an unlit cave underneath the hotel's sous-sol. She was a great hotelier, but after two months would always kick me out. "Mssr. trouvez un autre hotel, mais tu es toujours bien invitez pour les prochain fois."

She was tired of me, but I would be welcome the next time the same as ever. And she was always true to her word.

Strangely no one in Paris knew the meaning of ecouffes, but I think it means chokes or stuffed.

One night I took a tall red-headed model from Baltimore back to my room. Genie and I made love and in the morning madame served us coffee and croissants in bed. I really liked this woman and we engaged again after which I said, "You know what I like about you."

"No." She was hoping for a poetic caress, but I said, "You're big enough to carry me down the stairs if this place was on fire."

Genie's eyes widened and she jumped from the bed, dressing as if the hotel was ablaze.

"Fuck you."

A few words and I was persona non grata to the red-headed model and the madame de hotel explained later, "No woman wants to be called 'big'. Souviens ca."

And I have remembered that always, because Mdme. Saar knew more than her years.

"I hoped one day I would be the same.