Night tales: Berlin, LA, Stockholm, Pattaya, Rome
We met James in a Lonely Planet-approved place called Dicke Wirtin, in Berlin, after a day spent looking at the graves of Bertolt Brecht, Fichte and Hegel in the rain, and feeling very profound.
James was a big fat man in his 40s. He wore a broad-brimmed felt hat, a sort of Driza-Bone coat and a salt and pepper goatee beard that forked in the middle. He was an actor and singer, from Boston. He had appeared in a Philadelphia Cream Cheese commercial, which he expected us to have seen, as it had played in cinemas throughout the States in the 1980s. My travel diary doesnt record how hed wound up in Europe, but he was pursuing a musical career there.
How do I describe his music? His album, which he had committed to cassette tape, was titled Sexy Sadness. On the cover, there was a photograph of a much younger James reclining on a low-hanging tree bough in a rather brief toga. It featured a song called Cruisin on the Autobahn which, he explained, was too frankly sexual for radio play in Berlin.
He showed us his university ID card, which appeared to designate his profession as karate teacher. This surprised me, given his corpulence. He explained that karate is primarily mental. If you can make your mind carve up one second into split-seconds… well, thats karate.
He demonstrated his point. From here, he said, extending his hands in front of him, as though he were telling us about the size of a fish hed caught, to here, he said, swishing his hands past each other rapidly, setting his mid-section jiggering, is all in your mind. In addition to his skill as a karate sensei, musician and actor, James also mentioned that he had psychic powers.
He made a lot of jokes about shooting people who irritated him. He would adopt a Dirty Harry drawl and say, then I pulled out my .44 Magnum and blew him away. Then he would say, thats just my American black humour.
He also told a lot of lame, bawdy jokes that wed heard before and when we didnt laugh much, hed say So youre young and uptight. Thats okay. When youre older, youll remember the joke and be able to laugh about it - you wont feel that your bodys a bad thing any more. (I think about that sometimes. And what I think is, I cant remember any of his jokes and I havent noticed my body getting any less of a bad thing as I get older).
He was clearly an eccentric character and his girlfriend, an English nurse named Valerie, seemed nice. We made plans to meet up for a night out.
When we arrived at their place, James was practising with Ernesto, a quiet, reserved German engineer who played second violin in an orchestra but who said that improvisational playing with James satisfied all his musical requirements.
Also at James place was his friend Ralph, a narrow, 6ft 4, ZZ Top-looking biker who claimed to be the best English speaker in Berlin, but who, in reality, spoke very little English at all. All the same, he was very animated.
James and Valerie had made sauerkraut, bratwurst, wienerwurst, smoked pork and Black Forest ham, and boiled potatoes. After dinner, we headed for East Berlin in Ernestos old Mercedes. We were going to an open mic night at a place called Caf%26eacute; Harlem.
The running order was written on the wall behind the stage as well as the motto: Jeder der will - kann; Jeder der kann - mu%26szlig; (If you want to, you can; if you can, you must). A man in a Batman T-shirt and leather vest did a rendition of Hey Joe, singing only Hey Joe in English, and speaking the rest of the lyrics in German.
An extremely short, intense man called Bjorn got up and said, I dont do covers, I only sing my own songs. This one is in Hebrew. Its an Israeli language. I know it. When he switched to English midway through a song, it became clear that Hebrew had been disguising the awfulness of his lyrics, which had all the clumsy, sophomoric angst of a poetry-writing workshop.
Ralph laughed hard at Bjorn. He laid a finger against the side of one nostril and somehow whistled loudly out of the other one. Im not sure what kind of sentiment this gesture was meant to express. He and I were both drinking beer shandies made with Fanta instead of lemonade, an unlikely drink for a biker.
After Bjorn, a hamster-faced guy with lots of wild black hair got up with his guitar and mouth-organ. He looked a lot like Bob Dylan and sang a mixture of Bob Dylan songs and original compositions that sounded like Bob Dylan songs. He introduced one such work by saying, This is another Bob Dylan song I wrote.
We left soon after this, and went back to James and Valeries house. We were tired but James insisted on sitting up because, he said, he was excited by the rare opportunity to talk about philosophy. It was decided that we would stay the night on the little couch of his studio apartment.
Things got pretty hairy, my diary records. I cant remember in what order the insanity came, but he talked the most shit Ive ever heard.
At some point, James started talking about a knife he had when he was 14, describing what a good, what a handsome knife it was. I asked what a 14-year-old wanted with a knife. He said, matter-of-factly, that it was for magic. Misconstruing our surprised and concerned expressions, he added that he only did white magic.
Somewhere around that point, I started thinking about how much I loved my family, who were so far away in New Zealand and who I would never see again because this American freak was going to knife us and make us into wurst.
James returned to the topic of his being psychic. Earlier in the evening, at Caf%26eacute; Harlem, he had been in a corridor on his way to the mens toilets, staring at the bottom of a woman walking in front of him, and she had self-consciously touched her hand to her butt. When she emerged from the toilets, hed said to her, You have psychic abilities, dont you? This happens a lot, he told us. He stares at womens asses and they touch them, in an unconscious demonstration of their psychic powers.
Later on, I was trying to take my boyfriends new watch off but it broke and a spring flew through the air and we didnt see where it landed. We looked for it, but couldnt find it. The apartment was dimly lit. The carpet had a complicated pattern. In the tone of a bloke opening a tight jar for a lady, James instructed us to let him find it: he would put his psychic powers to work.
He got down on his hands and knees and swayed there for a while, then declared that the spring had gone into a parallel dimension, and that my boyfriend evidently wasnt meant to have the really nice watch Id just bought him.
We were leaving for Prague the next day, he reasoned. There would be gypsies there. The watch wouldnt be safe. So the universe had taken it from us until such time as it was appropriate for my boyfriend to have his watch back. The thing that bugged me about this was, the spring just had to be down there somewhere.
We went to bed. James snored a lot louder than hed sung, which was very loud. His breathing and the clicking sound of his mouth and tonsils made him sound like Darth Vader. We lay awake, giggling helplessly, for a long time.
PattayaBy Matt Suddain
I kissed a boy in Boy Town. Time stood still. Lets avoid any moral outrage over the fact that theres such a thing as Boy Town, or what I think of the place, or my reasons for kissing a young man in the middle of a crowded cocktail bar, in front of my girlfriend, her sister, their uncle, a lounge singer, her piano player, and the former manager of a famous 80s pop duo.
I was on a world trip with my girlfriend Sarah and her sister Gemma, and on the way home we were stopping in Pattaya, Thailand, to see their uncle Robert and his partner Sing. Robert is a wealthy industrialist who fled the north of England for a place more compatible with his leanings. Sing is a brilliant and boyish young Thai: a former athlete and speaker of multiple tongues. They share a sweet and loving marriage.
Robert and Sing took us to a few bars in Pattaya, but they were awful. Our hosts looked bored and Sarah confided that the bars they probably liked were a few streets over - in Boy Town. So I said, Lets go to Boy Town! and Sing grew a smile as big as Christmas. Boy Town. My stars. What a fevered carnival of delight. Lets be clear: Boy Town is not a place to literally find boys, and I saw nothing illegal (although I did hear about some recent police raids in another part of town). Its just a gay village, but it feels like a small city. You enter beneath a gate and into a furious storm of light and heat. The sign above the gate says Boyz Town- in case you missed the dancing men and the signs saying: Throb, Splash, and Boyz Boyz Boyz.
In the piano bar Caf%26eacute; Royale we found a more downbeat scene. A torch singer performed the hits of Bacharach while the boys of the bar, in peach shirts and little silver shorts, hung together in roving pods of fabulousness, or flirted with the regulars, slapping them lightly on the lapel as if to say Oh Mr Farang, you are TOO funny! Thats where we met Simon, a friend of Roberts. Simons a famous band manager, and hes suitably full of bull and bluster, but also quite a sweetheart. He wore a white linen suit, blue striped shirt and gold neck-chain. When the girls found out what particular 80s pop duo he had once managed, they went nuts. Sarah had a pair of goldfish when she was small: one called George, and one called Michael. Ill say no more. The girls must have made quite an impression on Simon, because he announced that he was taking us out to dinner.
The next night we met at a waterfront restaurant behind a fish market and ate lavish plates of seafood while Simon regaled us with unsolicited stories about… I cant say; they were so filthy that they just seemed to flow together like one long Aristocrats joke, or an excerpt from the Marquis de Sade books-on-tape series. He was trying to shock, in that way that omni-sexual men like to do, but hed picked the wrong crowd. Sarah and Gemma have the sensibilities of a pair of longshoremen. The only time Simon managed to shock was when he shared his theories on Buddhism and Sing quietly said, Id like you to stop talking about that.
After dinner we went to Boy Town. Simon pointedly introduced me to one of the local boys, a handsome man in his early 20s with a square face and moppish hair. I said he seemed nice, but this didnt satisfy Simon. Its curious how gay men can sometimes display an ironic intolerance. Theyre like those friends who cant believe youve given up smoking, and who constantly say, Mmmmmmm, sweet nicotine. Introducing me to the boy was like blowing smoke in my face.
We went to Caf%26eacute; Royale and the night got beautifully messy. The bar was packed, and the crowd sang along to All by Myself. Late in the evening Simon leaned over and said, almost sweetly, So you dont like boys at all? I changed the subject, I asked him about his new book, Black Vinyl, White Powder. He said it was selling well and he asked me if I wanted a signed copy. I said, Sure. Then he said: Ill give you the book if you kiss that lovely boy on the lips. And I almost laughed. I didnt really want the book, but declining would send two messages: that I thought kissing a boy was a big deal, and that I thought his book was worth less than a kiss.
Simon soon returned with book and boy. The crowd parted and we met in the middle. I kissed him on the lips, obviously - anywhere else would have been a cop-out or a drastic over-commitment. It was tender but passionless, like the kiss you might give to your wife on your 50th wedding anniversary. In other words, it was both loaded with, and completely void of, meaning. There was a round of applause, the girls laughed, the boy left, bemused. It was a trivial episode, but to Simon it seemed intensely satisfying, like the first long, slow drag on a cigarette. He said Well done, and handed me the book. A paperback. The dedication: Matthew, I hope you enjoy this book as much as you enjoyed that beautiful boy. He was right on the money. We drank on and Sing took his place by the piano to sing Wind Beneath My Wings to Robert, and there was not a dry eye.
The last I heard, Simon was managing a Russian boy duo called … wait for it … Smash! Me and the girls moved on to Koh Samed. I took Black Vinyl, White Powder and read the first chapter on the beach. The intense heat melted the cheap glue that held the spine together, all the chapters got muddled, several of the pages blew away down the beach, past the lolling tourists, and into the sea.
Los AngelesBy Jodie Molloy
If it was good enough for Belushi to die there, and for Britney to get bounced off the back porch, I was happy to give the Chateau Marmont a go. Expensive and pretentious? Sure. But a big night; good times dont come cheap in LA. Visions of downing Bellinis and epic glitz led me to the celebrity fountain where I wanted to feed my inner Raquel Welch circa 1970.
I am checked into my suite by an anorexic with a head the size of Beijing and, when left alone, I crudely guzzle my complimentary champagne and doodle indiscriminate kiwis all over my flash monogrammed stationery. I feel slightly nervous as I look around the room and out onto the strip. Maybe I cant go out tonight? Can I go from Takapuna to Tinseltown?
I am mildly anxious that my sartorial combination for the evening is, in LA, equivalent to a burqa. This city is going to be a tough nut to crack for a girl with the knees of a Cabbage Patch Kid.
When I meet an old friend in the courtyard, the wait staff stares at me like Siamese cats fed a Xenical diet. As the first $13 glass of gin arrives, I watch Robbie Williams in the corner, being a knob. Eddie Izzard sips water and power chats with what looks like Steven Spielberg crossed with a primordial dwarf. Rose McGowan is so small I can barely see her and Matthew Perry looks really unfriendly.
Hours pass. This hot-spot is about as exciting as watching paint dry. I tell my friend in passing that I have a thing for Vince Vaughn pre-Aniston. He perks up with inspiration and tells me that well go to the Dresden Rooms, made famous by the film Swingers. We ditch the sanctimonious crowd and, en route, my friend decides we have to go to The Ivy, citing an Eat Hollywood experience.
The risotto is good, and I learn that you shouldnt drink cocktails made by envious AA-going waiters who want to add friends to their weekly meetings. Macaulay Culkin is dining nearby and I am angling to go and high-five him for his work in Uncle Buck. I also ask Jorge the waiter why rich people pay to eat somewhere that could double as a Huck Finn-style shanty?
My friend deftly relocates me to the next venue, as I yell Orange Whip! all the way along Sunset Boulevard. Star Shoes, aside from a bad name, is really a bulimic farm that cleverly markets itself as a bar. After practising moves from Doom, I manage to knock off the baying under-fed and get served by a barman who looks like Lou Ferrigno.
I bristle at paying tips for drinks full stop, and especially ones that were thrown at my head. I vent my rancour on a lounge lizard who asks where Im from. That develops into an argument in which Im defending Peter Jackson and the Ring. Only when drunk will my hidden patriot appear. My passion supports the theory that all New Zealanders are related and that Im defending a Middle Earth cult.
As the lizard starts to imitate Gollum, I feign clinical death.
Thankfully, it appears the Liquor Tardis works. When I open my eyes, Im in a booth at the famed Dresden.
Marty and Elayne, the campy in-house cadavers, have been playing jazz here for 25 years. They belt out Stayin Alive as I belly up to the bar and order the signature drink, Blood and Sand. As I attempt to walk back, balancing my precious rum, a gaggle of strangers drags me away. I decide these cheery people have appeared in lieu of my real friends who, in spirit, would love to be here. At one point, Im misheard while dancing and talking at the same time. This results in somebody telling Marty and Elayne to sing me Happy Birthday. I am mortified, as the bar gives it their vocal all. I explain that its not my birthday at all, but nobody will hear of such Grinch talk. Its more rounds for Little Miss Celebration.
In the wee hours, my friend, the designated driver, and an actor who is worried about the ageing effect alcohol will have on his skin, tells me its time to give up the ghost. I am saddened, but as I egg on a mid-50-something to do the splits I realise that the good times must come to an end. There is an emotional goodbye with my new dance posse.
As we leave, I see Vince Vaughn in a corner. LA really is like being able to get into the enclosure at the zoo. Getting into the car, my inner voice is no longer Raquel Welch; its Demis Roussos calling for a midnight snack in the form of a hotdog from Pinks.
Stockholm By Laura MacFehin
For someone who has grown up in the South Pacific it is a pretty mind-warping thing to see the sea frozen. That is what happens when the temperatures drop where the Baltic meets Lake M%26auml;laren around the archipelago that makes up Stockholm. With the islands iced-in, the adventurous commuters who paddle their own canoes to work have to swap kayaks for cross-country skis. Everybody else takes the extremely efficient public transport.
We arrived in Stockholm to find the Baltic in such a state. However, the -10%26deg; C temperatures seemed positively balmy, perhaps because up north where we had spent Christmas the air thought nothing of cooling to -25%26deg;C when you went outside for a cigarette. Fridge too full with Christmas leftovers? Pop them on the front porch; unless some wildlife decides to come out of the forest and investigate, youre good.
If the snowy woods of the Swedish/Norwegian border are the perfect Christmas setting, then the sparkling elegance of Stockholm promises a spy novel-type sophistication that seems just right for New Years Eve. The 18th century buildings that come right down to the frozen water, the copper roofs that glitter in the hour or two of daylight that wintertime offers, the open-air ice-skating in Kungstr%26auml;dg%26aring;rden, the market stalls selling mulled wine and gingerbread.
Most Swedes who do not ring in the New Year at home like to go out to dinner to celebrate. Restaurants offer special New Year menus - usually a variation on fish or beef with some kind of potato dish served up with a lot of dill and mustard. This being the capital of one of the most organised peoples on the planet, the restaurants are fully booked for New Years Eve weeks ahead. With our usual I dont know, what do you want to do? slackness we had neglected to consider this.
So on December 31 we found ourselves wandering up the main drag, Sveav%26auml;gen, to find the only eatery with room at the table for us - the Hard Rock Caf%26eacute;. Here the menu spoke to us not of the exotic frozen north but rather in the universal language of burgers and fries. Still, friendly staff and our own innate tackiness soon had us feeling right at home. Smiling into our American beers, we could almost pity the Swedes with enough forethought to be downing caviar and aquavit at the Opera Caf%26eacute;.
After deciding to pass on the icecream sundae, we were out on the street again and back to our default I dont know… setting. Clubs, like restaurants, have to be planned in advance on New Years Eve as they often sell tickets for that one night, so you can be literally out in the cold there too without some forward planning.
Telling ourselves we were not in the mood for that kind of thing anyway, we started back through town to the part of S%26ouml;dermalm where our tiny flat was waiting for us. With everybody inside enjoying their well-planned festivities, the streets were silent. It feels pretty safe walking at night in Stockholm; the main danger in winter is icy cobblestones.
We stopped at Akkurat, a little bar with a fairly dingy-looking front which nevertheless has a large selection of beers and looks across the street to the impressive Maria Magdalena Kyrka. (Actually, the church there now is the new one, built in the 1700s after the original burnt down.) An older gentleman with a naval bearing sk%26aring;l-ed my partner with the solemnity that sk%26aring;l-ing etiquette requires. Apart from him, the bar was quiet.
We resolved to let the night die the subdued death to which it seemed destined. Properly fortified we left and made it home before midnight, switching on the television to see the live broadcast from Skansen, Stockholms open-air museum and historical village, the highlight of which is the reading of Tennysons Ring Out, Wild Bells in Swedish by a well known Swedish actor - a tradition too obscure or too deeply Scandinavian for us to penetrate.
With the countdown to this underway we had come to the conclusion that the Swedes, on the whole, were a reserved bunch. Then some explosions from the street shook the windows of our apartment. Looking outside we could see people crouching on the ice, standing in the street, coming out onto rooftops and balconies; everybody seemed to have their own arsenal of fireworks that they were letting off with shouts loud enough to rival the explosions.
Perhaps their neutrality during the war has left them constitutionally immune to the noise of explosions, perhaps the frozen ocean was acting as some huge sounding board, but they were the loudest fireworks I had ever heard.
Suddenly, it was all very exciting and romantic, watching one of the most beautiful cities in the world be illuminated by people who were still, after all, part-Viking.
ROMEBy Mark Broatch
Night in Rome begins with the passeggiata.
A gentle stroll you take through the pedestrian areas of the old city when work ends and the evening begins. Its not exercise: arms are never raised beyond hand-holding height. Its about chatting, laughing, flirting and gossiping, but mostly its about being seen. Italians dress up for the passeggiata; Giorgio forbid that you havent your best shoes on.
Poorly attired foreigners can sit around the piazzas and fountains and watch with the rest of Italy. It happens in Rome in the streets around the Spanish Steps or across the river - the Tiber or Fiume Tevere, the concrete-walled rush of water that Monica Vitti turns her back on in Antonionis LAvventura - in the narrow streets of Trastevere.
As soon as the sun dips, guitar music breaks out. Youve started the day, with your cornetto and cappuccino, had a gelato or two as the heat rose from about 25C to 30C in the late afternoon. Now its time for an aperitivo, perhaps a Peroni beer or a sparkling prosecco.
During the day, youve been lost a dozen times. Perhaps its that the Tiber winds in and out, around the Pantheon, back in towards the Colosseum. Perhaps you have been distracted by the stylish, sexy Romans, women and men, with their recklessly tight pants; the hopelessly good shoe shops; the scarily good food; the fairytale cobbled streets.
Rome is a glorious ruin, where you cant bury a cat without digging up a civilisation. Even so, it is a modern marvel, underground lines hewing through history to cut the circle of the city into four slices of ancient Margherita. In London the circular road around the metropolis is called the A205/406, in Paris La P%26eacute;riph%26eacute;rique, in Rome Il Grande Raccordo Anulare. If you ask Babelfish what that means, it says major beltway. I preferred the Italian.
When our evening ended and our night began, we wandered back to the modern, quietish neighbourhood of our hotel, Prati, in the north-west of the city, a Valerie Vili stones throw from the steep high walls of the Vatican. (The night before we had slept from 4pm to 7am, delayed fatigue from the hustle of travel, the shuffle of time zones, the linguistic barricades. I had dreamt of home, of a friend, pregnant, her swollen shiny bump full of her future. The sharp light and sounds of the city brought us back into the world.)
We fell upon a small place in a back street. Ravenous, we went in and took a table at the back. September in Rome is full of the kind of foreigners we were trying hard to avoid. We chose our entr%26eacute;es and our wine and relaxed as we looked around the room.
It might not have been so nondescript a place. One customer looked like a politician, all polished tan and brushed hair. His table partner, blonde and having had the frequent recent attentions of a beautician, was possibly not his wife. The waiters were deferential around them.
A couple came in, possibly saw us trying to look away, sat next to us. We politely ignored them, talked among ourselves. Whats that youre drinking, they asked, in that most hokey of American accents. Primitivo, we said reluctantly, less than willing to divulge what was our latest discovery in Italian wines. She was once an air hostess, she said, and she still had the careful makeup and coiffure; he was ancient but clearly wealthy beyond any career path I had immediately in mind. She fed him his entr%26eacute;e with a spoon. They were pleasant enough company. Some nationalities are awful in general, bearable in the particular. But when they started to correct the English of the waiter who had delivered their mains, I had to turn away.
But the food, the food was spectacular. Yet I can not tell you what we had. I cant even remember what we had to start or to follow. Probably antipasto and pasta. Italian food isnt fancy: quality ingredients prepared with love and care. And every Italian knows what good food is; expects it every time. The entr%26eacute;e and dessert trolleys were what really opened our eyes and set our saliva glands into overdrive - delicious slabs of meat and cheese and pieces of fruit were rolled around the room by a man who had done this for decades. He sedately cut off slices at the table. But after our mains we were too full to try a sweet or coffee. We paid our bill and said goodbye to our new American acquaintances. We walked back to our hotel in the warm darkness. We pushed through the wooden door to the courtyard, went into the metal cage of a lift and back to our room over the courtyard. Unlike any hotel room before or since, it felt like home.
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Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 6:06 pm under