Lydia’s Blog

Thank you for NOT smoking…seriously?

I smoke cigarettes. I am also aware that there is a satire out in cinemas in the U.S. at the moment that tackles the subject pretty thoroughly. Still, please consider the fact that this film won’t make it to Germany for several months yet…and so what I’m writing has little or no connection to the film.

Smoking for me started much in the way that it does for most people. A bad kid on a middle-school sponsored camping trip brings along a pack of Camel wides and the first puff is taken. One encounters cigarettes relatively often thereafter.

In fact smoking in high school is just about the most generic form of rebellion available. It’s like the international adolescent signal for “I hate my parents”. At Conard High School between 1992 and 1996, the music/drama geeks (which would have to have been my qualification) smoked to say “fuck the jocks”. The white supremacists, sluts, goths, loners, scary Puerto Rican girls, angry dykes, hippie outdoorsy guys, chicks that thought they were lesbians because they dug on Drew Barrymore, suburban gangsters, and even the popular kids all basically smoked to say “fuck you” to one another.

After high school, I went to a prominent music conservatory to study voice…and anathema, one might think, to smoking. Well, as per the pattern, I smoked to say “fuck singing”.

My smoking began in earnest in the summer of 1998, between my sophomore and junior years. It was my first job as an assistant director, at an impressively mediocre summer program. I wanted to drive a wedge between my persona as a singer and my newfound role as omnipresent cynic. This, I decided, could be accomplished by training myself to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes a day. The brand was Benson and Hedges Ultra Lights (in the box, just like my Olivier had preferred). At first it was really hard. I could do eight or nine a day in the beginning. By the time I left the program, fat, brokenhearted from my first big l*v* and none the better for my experience with the program…I had managed to reach my goal.

My insane Korean housemates my junior year were pros at playing bad girls, and then switching effortlessly into perfect princesses. (As evidenced by the seamless switch-in of Hello Kitty trinkets for boy-band posters, bribed Korean pals for skeezy townie boyfriends and strange fish products for western groceries within our apartment upon the arrival of any sort of parent). I learned from them how to continue smoking while manufacturing the appearance of a dutiful voice major.

At grad school, I was able to smoke in earnest. Outdoors. In my apartment. At restaurants. In front of people, without fear they’d rat on me. It was a drama conservatory, and I was in very good company. People routinely gave and received cartons as gifts.

Berlin, from the second I got there, and certainly from the dawn of tobacco imports, has always been a smoker’s paradise. You can smoke in airports, malls, hospital waiting rooms, universities, and most importantly, opera houses. Smoking, as far as I could tell, was part and parcel of adult human interaction in Europe. It’s not something your mom does in the basement in winter with all of the windows open, after she thinks the kids are asleep. It’s just the way it is.

I’m not you’re typical smoker in any case. I have absolutely no taste for cigarettes whatsoever until late afternoon or so, when I can begin smoking at regular intervals. I can go days without, not feeling like disemboweling colleagues. Mine is not an addictive personality, rather a compulsive one (if you’ve ever seen me around a bag of beef jerky, you’ll know exactly what I mean).

It’s just nice. Certain combinations are especially lovely. Alcohol and cigarettes. Social gatherings, particularly lame ones, and cigarettes. A moment alone on a balcony late at night and cigarettes. Writing and cigarettes. The one standard I don’t go for is coffee and cigarettes—it makes me poop.

One of my absolute favorite combinations is end of a long day of rehearsal and cigarettes.

Today I had to sprint from my afternoon rehearsal in some sultry jungle outside of Stuttgart to a meeting at the opera’s chamber theater. No time for the post-cigarette.

I got to the theater and begged the first person I saw, a production manager, where I could dodge out for a quick one.

“I haven’t had one yet today…” I said, breathlessly.

“Well then, just don’t.” he said. I looked at him like I was crazy and made some abstract begging gestures while whimpering.

He rolled his eyes and led me to a dock door. It was raining. I immediately stepped out and lit my ultra-ultra-barely-even-a-qualifiable-cigarette-it’s-so-light stoge and inhaled deeply.

The production manager clucked disapprovingly. Only seconds later, he was joined by a lighting technician and a props master who, like some overly-moralistic trifecta, began to lecture me about smoking.

There I stood in the rain, listening to these three men standing dry in the doorway. One said, “you know, I wouldn’t want to kiss an ashtray.” I used every bit of self control I have not to inform him that the ashtray under scrutiny wouldn’t want to kiss him, either.

You know, I will quit someday—and when I do, it won’t be the gum and patches fiasco it is for some people. Of this I’m sure. Until that day, however, I will simply puff away as I write my stupid little stories. With impunity, thank you very much.

I just feel like writing. Hmm. What about. I guess I could write about the twenty-minute discussion I found myself involved in with this café’s owner, about how I should pay her to plug my computer in, despite the fact that I drop about twelve euros a day here, on average. Maybe I should write about my first original work produced by a big opera house, a reworking of a experimental pantomime I developed in Berlin in 2004—and how I found out today that it’s been scheduled during the house’s big opening concert. In direct competition with Calixto Bieito’s new staged version of a Zarzuela. Or I could expound on how I tore the head off a technician that wanted to invite me to lunch in order to discuss scenic plans that he already has, written out in excruciating detail.

Hmmm. No.

It’s fucking hot in Stuttgart. Not quite as hot as, say, New York—but undeniably worse. And here’s why: NO BUTTFUCKING AIR CONDITIONING—anywhere.

Picture a hot day in New York. You wake up in your air-conditioned apartment. You walk the seven scalding minutes and wait four more in the broiling piss-winds of the Subway. Then, you ride twenty-three minutes in cooled subway car, walk seven more scalding minutes, then finding yourself at your pleasant, air-conditioned destination. Maybe you even bring along a sweater in case it gets too chilly.

That’s a total of eighteen scalding minutes, one-way. Let me tell you about my one-way.

I wake up in a Lydia-shaped pool of sweat on a nasty, itchy, cheap sofa (which is also supposed to serve as a bed), having woken up several times in the night to re-soak a dishtowel with cold water in an attempt to cool my solarplexus.

The routine showering, shitting, and shaving occurs, after which I search for an outfit that will concurrently not cover too much skin, wick away sweat, not cling to my bulges when my pores begin gushing like geysers, and also prevent welts from forming on the insides of my thighs from the forest-fire-inducing combination of sweat and friction (so no skirts, ever).

I walk the two minutes to the bus, wait another fifteen minutes for it to get there, and ride the ten minutes to the main station, all in blazing heat. Then I traipse down into the un-air conditioned subway, wait up to twenty-five minutes for a train, and travel the twelve minutes to the middle of nowhere, never once feeling circulating or cool air. If I haven’t sweated every last garment on my body through by that point, there’s always our rehearsal space to provide the kicker. A factory hall full of unmoving, 103-degree air, with an uncoverable glass ceiling—just so I can be blinded by the sun whilst sweating out a quarter of my body weight over the course of a day.

Everything sticks to everything. My ass to chairs. The singers to each other. My fingers, and ankles look like hard, angry columns of shiny flesh. My feet don’t fit into shoes, so I live in flops. I don’t even bother with makeup anymore, because it’ll just melt down my face.
When I bitch to Germans about how backwards they are about temperature control, I get monologues about how air-conditioning is environmentally disastrous, expensive, makes you sick and prevents you from getting better. Maybe they’re right but I mean, Christ, this is ridiculous.

I am grateful for one thing, though. At least Germans are into deodorant. If I were in Italy, I’d be really fucked.

Wow. I guess that means that Stuttgart actually is preferable to something. Imagine that.

Birthdays are always somewhat surreal. Even more so when one is alone in a strange city.

I woke to find that my TV had stopped producing the three channels to which I have become accustomed. This situation proved so disturbing, that I rang the doorbell of the neighboring apartment that, coincidentally, belongs to the couple that are renting me my tiny place. By eight-thirty, I had two elderly, half-dressed, perplexed Yugoslavians ambling around my closet-sized flat.

It solved nothing. Shortly thereafter, they quit, and I left the flat for work.

For the first time ever, I made every connection in my typically 75 minute trip to the greenhouse where we rehearse, placing me there unnaturally early, therefore risking over an hour of chatting with Guido the technician, who I now officially find strange, without the buffer of other people.

I decided to walk the last half-hour that would normally be traversed by a bus, in order to kill some time.

On the way, I decided to stop at a German megastore…which sort of resembles a cross between a soviet mental hospital and a Wal-Mart. I bought apples, bananas, carrots, Gummi Frogs, dish detergent and facial wash. As in Wal-Marts, there are charmless eateries by the main entrance/exits. I grabbed a coffee at one and sat down.

There I sat, staring into space, enjoying detesting everything around me, through a stupor of exhaustion and mild hangover. The way every noun here ends with the infuriating “li” suffix. Brezel (pretzel) turns into Brezli, Würst (sausage) turns into Würstli and so on. The way doughy-looking Germans wandered with their packed shopping carts, looking like the pale, blank undead. I turned to look over my right shoulder. A very old, gray, German couple sat at an adjacent table.

They were staring and chewing. And staring and chewing. And chewing. And staring. Their gazes didn’t budge from whatever distant point upon which they were fixed, while two sets of hands brought two identical pastries to two sets of lips, behind which two sets of jaws with two sets of bad teeth chewed and chewed and chewed in the garish light of this most constitutionally narcoticized of Wal-Mart knock-offs.

After I had been fixated on this couple for what seemed like hours, I felt a tap on my shoulder. An old, slim, beef-jerky-colored man with huge white fake teeth was bent over my left side. He held the back page of the Bild newspaper out in front of my face. He pointed with wide-eyed interest at the girl pictured on the page. As per tradition for the girls on the back of the Bild, this specimen’s enormous, tanned breasts were exposed, and she was wearing a pair of tiny white shorts which left little doubt regarding the exact dimensions of her labia.

He pointed excitedly at the picture. “It says here, that she has eighty pairs of shoes and no boyfriend…imagine that!”

What I wanted to say was “What in the fuck is wrong with Stuttgarters.” What I actually said was “Wow. That’s really interesting”.

He was encouraged. He gestured toward the short, black text accompanying the photo. “…and, it says she’d throw any man out of bed who objects to her dogs being there!”

At a loss for what to say in order to end the conversation, I said the first thing that came to my mind “Have you heard the good news of our lord, Jesus Christ?”

His smile instantly faded, and he wandered away, muttering. I grabbed my belongings and left, casting a last glance at the chewing couple, who’d apparently missed the entire exchange.

Rehearsal went as normal. Little skirmishes, minor victories. One step closer to the competent reproduction of somebody else’s twelve-year-old work.

I got back to my apartment around five in the afternoon. It was stinking, sticking hot. The TV still wasn’t working. Laundry is simply not something one does on one’s birthday, and I do after all have one last pair of underwear. What to do, then? I decided that my domicile needed mustard and beverages, and went out in search of these items.

The Stalin-memorial supermarket to the south of my building is simply too depressing to bear, so I wandered south in search of an Aldi, Plus, Lidl, Edecka or Kaiser’s…stores most normal Germans view in the category of basic human rights. Nothing. After considerable meandering, I found a BioSupermarkt, and in my desperation, decided to find drinks and mustard there.

I hate BioMarkts. They tend to charge twice as much for tiny, overripe fruits and veg that’ll already be rotting eighteen hours after purchase. People who feel the need to pay six euros for a bottle of juice should be put away. I really don’t care if my mustard is free-trade, to be honest. Still, I found some that was, and grabbed it. The drinks? Forget it.

As I made my way toward the checkout, walking past free-range, humane chocolate and compostable diapers, I heard a female voice.

I turned. “Would you like to sample our organic rose water spray?” The woman was blond, tall and thin with a long, horse-like face and very thin lips.

“Sure”, I said, and she pumped a liberal portion all over my arms and shoulders.

“Do you like it?” she asked, “People in Iran drink rose water for its soothing benefits.”

I smelled the insides of my elbows for a second, tube of mustard in hand. It actually was very nice. I looked up and smiled at the woman.

“I’m twenty-eight…” I said.

There was a long pause. I’m not sure why I decided to say that. I’m not sure what kind of response was expected. She looked to the side briefly, cleared her throat and wordlessly handed me a small free sample.

I paid for my mustard and went home.

Forty-five minutes ago, I turned twenty-eight.

I celebrated with people who just one month ago, I’d not yet met. My new colleagues. Maybe even at some point, my new friends. Who knows.

We met at eight-thirty at some Italian restaurant in what would in most cities constitute an ugly, unlivable courtyard…but here in Stuttgart gets to call itself a hot locale. We toasted a lot of things. The beginning of rehearsals, collaboration, Stuttgart itself. Then at midnight, we toasted me.

My colleagues gave me plants for my birthday. One pot full of cactus-like creatures, and another tiny pot sporting an odd creation featuring leaves that are red at the bud, then turning green as they grow out.

I though it was sweet. How were they to know that I can use plants just about as much as Nelson Mandela could use a job harvesting cotton on Orrin Hatch’s plantation.

It was nice. Officially, I can’t complain.

When I turned twenty-seven, I had everything figured out. I knew my work in the opera was taking me forward, I knew where I’d be living and when, who I’d be spending my time with—I knew who I was and who I was becoming.

Twenty-eight looks like a question left blank on a DMV form. Perhaps even intentionally so.

Maybe we should toast that fact.

On the way here, as I was walking down Stuttgart’s empty backstreets on what has become a pleasant Friday night, the only people in sight were a squirming four-year-old boy, and the petite, brunette young mother who was spanking the shellac out of him.

Although such sights have always inspired an odd nostalgia in me, I, like most people, are generally uncomfortable with scenes involving unselfconscious public child pummeling.

Still, it was occurring on my side of the street…and I though it would be rude to dodge across so as to avoid.

After she’d delivered six or seven thick spanks, she grabbed the weeping child’s hand and pulled him into a light trot down the sidewalk beside her.

“Ennis is stupid!” the boy cried.

The mother stopped mid-gait, crouched down and barked directly in the boy’s face “No, Ennis is not stupid. Ennis was right. You should know better than to take your pants off outdoors in the city. We discussed this just last night. You have to keep your pants on. Good boys keep their pants on. Ennis is not stupid. He’s just trying to keep your pants on.”

The child’s weeping softened to a low whimpering. His mother tugged him back into march-step.

Suddenly a piercing wail filled the air as the boy began bawling in earnest. “But that means I’m stupid!”

An awful realization. One we’ve all had, or perhaps still have, over and over again.
I’m pretty sure the mother stopped again, but I can’t be sure. I did, in the end, cross the road and start walking like I meant it.

I wouldn’t know it until much later, but one of the worst days of my adolescent life was also one of the best.

I was thirteen and in the seventh grade. It was a nasty time for me. My best friend from childhood had, at the advent of middle school, discovered that she was, indeed, black—and therefore spent her time exclusively in the company of other black kids and the few white kids that went out of their way to look like Public Enemy groupies.

Not knowing where else to turn, I’d done my best and coincidentally, most pathetic to insinuate myself into a group of popular girls, most of which had gone to my grade school. In that most volatile arena of preteenage bravado and misery, the middle school cafeteria, I held a most tenuous place at the popular girl table—where I’d mostly just overeat in silence, just grateful to be sitting where I was sitting. Sure, these people never called me on the weekends, passed me notes or spoke to me in class, but somehow, they’d found it in their hairsprayed, Skid Row-obsessed hearts to allow me to perch in reverent silence in their midst.

Until one day. It was actually rather ceremoniously announced that I would no longer be welcome in privileged seventh-grade society. I was told in no uncertain terms that my presence at the popular table would no longer be desired or appreciated.

The tacit social armistice that had been my world for months crumbled and dissolved in an instant. I was beside myself. Sure, I couldn’t get my bangs as big as Sonja’s or Joanne’s, or recite life facts about Sebastian Bach like Lauren and Caroline. I hadn’t even managed to get fingered under the bleachers at a dance like most of them, especially Sarah, who’d just days before received her first three-fingered salute from Jesse Cole (all I had was my imaginary boyfriend Mike Buck from music camp). It was a disaster, pure and simple. And right before Bat Mitzvah season.

My mind reeled as I gingerly picked up my tray and wandered off, away from the security of social prestige via association. As I scanned the cafeteria for other seating possibilities, my heart sank. Everywhere I could possibly sit would be tainted by the shame of what had just seconds ago occurred. How could I explain my sudden presence? How could I admit to having been cast out?

Of course. It was so obvious. And mortifying. I’d have to find the outcasts.

I wandered into a section in the cafeteria into which I’d only minutes earlier never dreamed of going. It was a realm of R.E.M. t-shirts and middle parts sans bangs. Plaid flannels and Doc Martens. I approached tentatively, swallowing every bit of my country-club elementary pride.

“Can I sit with you guys?”

A girl in a black T-shirt, big silver earrings and a head full of not-so-little braids looked up at me. She gave a knowing half-smile. “Okay.”
Within days, I’d become totally accepted by this table of misfits…children of divorcees and working-class drones…worlds away from the white-wine swilling Dr. and Mrs. X spawn I’d grown up with. We’d cackle over tater tots molded into ovaries and vas deferens, the dickholes at the next table who’d spent their life savings on Color Me Badd tickets, and the band director, Dr. Hopko, who had a nasty habit of getting boners during practice.

Soon after, there came parties, crushes, trips to the mall, sleepovers—for the first time in my pubescent life. Things I’d never even known I was entitled to.

Most of all there was Katie. The girl in the black with the earrings and the braids. She became my best friend. She was the queen bee of the misfits. We watched the breakfast club and ate rolls of cookie dough. We plotted ways to torture her sociopathic big sister. We’d sit in her bedroom at her Dad’s house, listening to the Beatles and discussing people we hated. We’d philosophize about Potato buds at her Mom’s house, before getting down to the business of playing with her two new kittens. We’d walk back to my place after school and eat boxes of cherry cordials, hoping to get drunk. We found a bottle of my Mom’s Tanqueray and managed to actually do it. On one of these visits, we found my Dad’s copy of Emmanuelle. The next time I knew my parents wouldn’t be home, we invited the rest of the crew for a viewing. Throughout the rest of my time in West Hartford, we all quoted it like fiends.

“Marionge, you are a nasty bitch.”

“Oh yes, then why are you waiting?”

growling lisceviously “…you are a nasty bitch.” Enter porno bass, man approaches Marionge and fucks her on a table, camera shoots from above.

I told Joe Buccheri that she liked him, and she didn’t speak to me for weeks. After that episode, I found out that this one woman’s forgiveness is the one thing in the world that I might just kill for. Luckily or unluckily…I’ve enjoyed that forgiveness several times throughout my life.

Katie and I grew up. She became Smate, and I became Smydia. I don’t know how. We got pubes, weight problems and cars. To my surprise, my prediction about orange Sour Patch Kids was actually correct: They do give you huge tits. We made out with people and eewed about it later. We counter-tormented the assholes that called us lesbos. Kate: “It’s actually an island, you hare-lipped pig-fucker.”

She and I snuck out and headed for the Olympia diner, where she’d tirelessly counsel me for hours…talking me out of my latest crash diet, and questioning the logic of allowing Aaron Packard to burn the letter A into my arm with a lighter. Well, I was in love of course. Then he asked her to his senior prom and I learned what it means to love someone you hate…even if the hate is only temporary.

Ironically, later in high school, Kate and I secured cult status with certain popular men as alternatives to the anorexic paper dolls occupying their official social level. There were parties. Lots to drink, lots to smoke. Lots of truth-or-dare and running naked through golf courses. Lots of Kate making sure I vomited in the toilet and not all over myself. Lots of the both of us protecting the other from being choked by Andy Lee’s tongue. (He likes the round ones, don’t you know.) We dressed Football, Hockey and Lacrosse stars up in my grandmothers old gowns, drove them to supermarkets, and watched them run around, freaking out entire families.

We videotaped ourselves a lot. The freshman musical. Me performing a choreography on a stationary bike to the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Breaking the Girl. Us grousing and griping. Kate swinging her braids.

The day of our graduation, Kate and I drove around in my 1988 Dodge Caravan with Big Gulps in hand, pelting passerby with green and black Jujy Fruits (the rest we ate).

We went to college. I became and addict. She became a shut-in. I abandoned my voice. She dropped out. It was hard to be away from her. When I was a senior, she went away for a semester in Prague. I was so jealous. I just knew I’d never get to live in Europe for a few months.

When I’d gone to Pittsburgh to grad school, I got a call. “I’ve met an amazing guy…he lives in San Diego, and he sent me a Goonies poster.” I remember being happy for her, as well as sort of jealous. Surely it wouldn’t amount to anything. He did, after all, live in California—a world away from Boston, where she was at the time.

Then she moved to San Diego.

Then I moved to Germany.

Kate’s birthday is on July 20. Mine on July 24. Over the fifteen years of our friendship, we’ve celebrated at least ten birthdays together, including last year’s, when I was on shore leave from my life in Berlin, and she’d just moved to Brooklyn with her bulimic kitty (one of the sweet kittens from middle school) and incredible I-guess-true-love-really-is-like-matching-two-socks-in-the-laundry boyfriend, Goonies-poster John.

Her birthday is today. Mine’s on Monday. She’s in New York. I’m in (trying not to vomit in my own mouth) Stuttgart. So far away.

Still, I know that ever since I managed that terrifying walk across the cafeteria to meet her in the first place, all those years ago, I’ll somehow manage to see her soon enough, regardless of any time zones standing in the way.

And when I see her again, I’ll tell her that I love her. And that in some way, she saved me.

I would like to amend past statements. Stuttgart is still one fucking hot shithole.

Today was day three of my rehearsals for a production of Hänsel and Gretel that I’ve never actually seen. I’ve learned this production from a book that alternates between empty and illegible…in addition to the dark, shaky premiere DVD. Apparently a lot of shit went south during the premiere, and the house veterans have a lot of fun telling me that what I’m actually staging is a mistake from the opening performance. Swell.

My task is to slap two casts that’ve also never seen this production before into this show in what amounts to three weeks total. Two casts, some seventy supers and a childrens’ chorus of fifty, that is. This kind of work combines several diverse circumstances that range from kinda lame to totally fucked.

At least in Graz on Le Grand Macabre, I could give some background and depth to the stage action by explaining the origins of individual scenes, drawing on the two months I originally spent supporting the creation of the production. “The original singer was a huge homosexual with a club foot, and so that’s why you stumble and fall, shrieking at this particular point….”

Now, all I can basically say is, “…well, it looks like Hänsel gets kicked in the shin here, but it might just be him stumbling over a broomhead misset by a props department ringer before the premiere…”

My singers are pretty cool and totally game however. They sort of have to be. We’re rehearsing in a space that hits temperatures of 104 Fahrenheit during the afternoon. No shit, I measured. For those who know the reference, it’s closest to the rehearsal hall in the back of Wolf Trap’s Filene Center, when the dock doors are shut for a sound test on the main stage. So far, we’ve only had two faints. Moreover, the space is over an hour from my apartment on public transportation.

The rehearsals are pretty severely undermanned as well. No conductor, no prompter, no stage manager. No in-house props or costume staff (I mean, it is a warehouse in the middle of nowhere with a glass ceiling during a heat wave…)

To be fair though, some five productions are being rehearsed simultaneously at the opera, in preparation for the current administrations departing festivities, as well as those of the incoming team. Everyone’s being tough about this and fuck it, so will I.

The one omnipresent figure in these rehearsals. His name is Guido. He’s a house technician somehow granted the unromantic task of moving heavy scenery alone in 104 degree heat.

Guido is an attractive man. Late thirties, probably. Hmm, I though at first, maybe Joolz isn’t totally insane when it comes to stagehands. I decided to hang out in the rehearsal room during the break from our first rehearsal day. Guido gave me a light and droned for a while about what a hard worker he is. Great, I thought. This will work out well.

He’s certainly very eager to please. Right from the beginning on the first day, he’d prepare and serve me pot after pot of coffee until I was shaking and seeing spots. Guido is maybe a little bit simple, I thought initially. Who cares, though, right Joolz?

The second day of rehearsal, yesterday, Guido pulled me aside and told me that the outfit I’d been wearing the day before had been a mistake. I wondered if I’d heard him correctly. Yes, he said…although a dropped, drawstring waist and high heels would seem like a good idea, particularly on a body like mine…a plain wife-beater, jeans and flip flops, as I was wearing during the conversation, would prove a wiser choice for more corpulent bodies, such as mine.

This was definitely not an instance of lost in translation. He used the German word for corpulent: corpulent.

I smiled and thanked him for his input, not knowing what else to do. He smiled, saying his honesty was a prized quality.

Later, my Hänsel and Gretel approached me, saying they believed the Guido was planning to prepare a huge salad for the next day’s rehearsal. I told them to calm down, and of course he wasn’t. They seemed relieved. That would have been weird.

Today, the two ladies, our pianist and I were greeted at a short, 15-minute break by a torso-sized salad, and a grinning Guido. We all ate together. I didn’t say much.

At the end of the strange, unexpected-but-yeah-kind-of-expected-but-you-know-salad-party, Guido announced that he’d be preparing a breakfast buffet for our rehearsal on Saturday. Would champagne be okay for all of us?

I’m not sure what I did when he made this declaration. I hope I said thank you. I probably just stared, though.

Fuck.

It’s bad enough that this wet turd of a city is filled with status-crazed, middle-aged, beef-jerky-colored dough puppets driving their Bugattis around the empty, charmless streets expecting some sort of hollow, sickly-sweet validation of their vapid, useless, my-very-existence-is-a-pro-choice-argument lives….

On top of everything, it’s a matter-sucking black-hole as far as material goes. What can one say about such exceptional averageness?

Except get me the quick fuck out of here.

I am currently searching for the seventh apartment of my adult life. Two at Oberlin, one in Pittsburgh, three in Berlin and now, lucky seven in Stuttgart. The other apartments I’ve lived in have either belonged to friendly boyfriends or been provided by employers during gigs.

First of all, Stuttgart is fucking ugly. It was bombed to shit (like many other German cities) in the Second World War, and reconstructed (like many other German cities) with the cheapest and nastiest possible materials in the years following the war. These new buildings tend to be boxy, small-windowed affairs with low ceilings and bad floors. Many of these buildings were given superficial makeovers in the 1980s, lending them a faded, dirty and sad pastel hue on top of their general unsightliness.

As I’ve written, I lived in Berlin’s most trendy, PoMo bubble for the last year or so…full of preposterous boutiques and crawling with Berlin’s young, intellectual leisure class that, oddly enough, seems to often intersect Berlin’s young, intellectual under- or unemployed class. It’s sort of like a grungy, stylish, vibrant enclave littered with bewildered remnants of the area’s original East German tenants.

From the moment I got here, I tried to find a ‘hood like Prenzlauerberg. In Germany they call it “Kiezgefühl”. I asked numerous people who knew both Berlin and Stuttgart and they would unanimously chuckle, shrug, and say “forget it”. A few of the respondents would, after their initial reaction consider my question for an additional second and then say “well, Stuttgart west, I guess. Kind of.”

I looked at my second apartment today. My first in Stuttgart west (where my temporary apartment is also located. See the second paragraph about ugly apartment buildings). It is not, in any way, like Prenzlauerberg. However, it doesn’t immediately raise bile to my throat like most other parts of Stuttgart.

At times it reminds me of a clean, lobotomized version of Brooklyn without any Latinos. Sometimes it looks a bit like Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh. Occasionally I think Georgetown. Lots of old cut-stone buildings and quiet, leafy streets. I remained stunned at the fact that, in a city with so much disposable income, there are so few shops. I don’t even mean indie-label vinyl shops or $120 t-shirt stores…I mean a serious dearth of the kind of shops Germans traditionally hold dear: Bakeries, Newsstands, Döner imbisses and Pharmacies. Residential tends to mean residential in Stuttgart, without a lot of deviation.

And the prices are seriously disappointing. For any New Yorkers reading this, you might want to quit now so as not to risk projectile vomiting onto your computer screen.

My spacious two room (bedroom, living room, kitchen, bathroom (with bathtub) and hallway) furnished apartment on the absolute best corner in Berlin was costing me, on average with gas and electric, EU 400 a month (like, $470). My monster studio in the shitty Turkish ghetto the year before cost me EU 250 ($305) a month. These prices allowed me to kind of live like a rock star in Berlin. I could go out constantly, buy shoes at will, travel, take cabs…

The fat years are over, as they say here. I saw a dark, small, ugly two bedroom with a tiny balcony overlooking dumpsters yesterday that would cost, all inclusive, EU 515 ($610 or so) a month. Still not a lot, but considering the prices for everything else in this cursed city, and what I’ve grown accustomed to in Berlin…this will be a huge inconvenience.

I’m about to check out a big furnished place what would cost me an impossible EU 800 a month ($1000). This would eat up well over half of my disposable salary per month (what can I say, this glamorous lifestyle doesn’t pay), and destroy my ability to leave this sick excuse for an urban center at will.

The one I checked out earlier, if the winds of landlord luck blow in my direction, I’d probably take. It’s not all that nice, in that it doesn’t have a bathtub, and there are strict rules forbidding WLAN and cordless telephone use…but there was just something about it. Nice old building. Decent wood floors. Tiny balcony overlooking dumpsters (from a considerable height, however). EU 550 a month.

I just don’t think I can do any better.

In general.

UPDATE: I decided to take the EU 800 place. Sure, I’ll have to either sell a kidney or birth a child to a gay couple–but the place really was spectacular. Like a ray of sunshine through the shitclouds, if you will. Come visit when you can.

Tommy and I met somewhere around December of 2002, in the very cold apartment of the great uniter of Berlin’s young English-speaking scene at the time, Danny B. I was there with my erstwhile pal Jacque (no s), and as was customary for such visits, embarrassingly stoned. At midnight or so, Tommy stopped by.

He had already mastered the admired Berlin style of incorporating dozens of mismatching layers—on that occasion wife-beater, t-shirt, pullover, hoodie and coat, if I remember correctly. His right pants leg was rolled up as per cyclist chic, and he wore thick-framed black glasses. He seemed unbelievably charming and witty, and I felt like an incoherent lump in comparison (partially due to my compromised state, naturally). I think I tried to grandstand a bit…or maybe even flirt. This wasn’t so successful, and I distinctly remember a look he gave me that night that said “you jackass…”. He left before I did that evening, prompting a defeated shrug from me. Oh well, I thought. I’d probably never see him again.

This assumption proved incorrect. In the years since that first meeting, Tommy and I have established one of the most valuable and nuanced friendships I’ve ever had. Tommy has become the closest thing I have to family in Berlin.

It’s not always easy with us. We bicker and get into scuffles, which are thankfully then resolved without any discussion or soul-searching. We get pissed off, annoyed and bored with each other just as with any close relation. We can exacerbate or eradicate one another’s tendency toward stagnation, inversely—depending on the day and situation.

Tommy is the one who moved me to Stuttgart this past Tuesday. He was the one who helped he assemble my belongings, effects and memories into a van and drive me from my home of four years to a strange, terrifying new place.

The odd thing about the move was that it wasn’t difficult of scary at all. I didn’t cringe when we passed the sign announcing departure from Berlin. My gut didn’t knot itself throughout the seven-hour drive. He’d ask if I was okay, and the honest answer was always yes.

Yes. Yes.

And it was. Walking with Tommy through the ugly, charmless streets of Stuttgart was perfectly delightful. With him sitting on the couch (slash bed slash work desk), I somehow didn’t notice how hideous and sad my closet-sized guest apartment was. As we walked the several blocks back to the apartment from the van after storing my life in an acquaintance’s basement, swilling wine straight from the bottle, singing and cackling, I had no concept of how barren and awful that route would look when walked alone.

In fact, nothing about my decision to leave or the move disturbed me until Tommy drove away shortly before noon yesterday, in an empty van. As had become customary, I’d misread our map and placed us at a remote gas station high up on a hill on the outskirts of Stuttgart.

Then it hit me. All at once. That wasn’t just Tommy driving away, this man who’d become so irreplaceable to me—it was really Berlin disappearing into the distance with him. It was four years of euphoria, heartbreak, ambition, disappointment, comfort, alienation, success, struggle—in the form of an enormous van driven by a small, tan British guy. The person I’ve been…the person I’ve become, or at least part of her, drove away as well.

Near the gas station, I found the entrance to a leafy path leading down the mountain back into Stuttgart. I was grateful for the shadowy green protection as I cried and cried.