Lydia’s Blog

Today I flew to Berlin…basically for no other reason that to see my heterosexual life partner, Joolz.

Heterosexual life partnership is a much less strange classification that you might think. Consider Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King. Romy and Michelle. Dorothy and Blanche. Peggy Bundy and Marcie Darcy…

Okay, the last one was weak…but you get me. HLPs are basically just two cock-lovin’ ladies who seem to be twin sisters born from two sets of parents. There are certain personality deficits in the one that are bolstered by the particular strengths of the other one, and vice versa. Serious life issues are discussed between topics like “can big girls wear thongs?” and “smell this shirt, can I wear it again today?”

I met Joolz backstage during a lighting rehearsal for a production of Jenufa at the Komische Oper. She was the stage management intern and I was the directing intern. She spoke way better German than me…and finding out she was American, promptly switched to English. For some reason, in the darkness backstage, I think I also thought she was black. Anyway….our first conversation went like this:

Me: So where in the states are you from?

Joolz: Umm…Los Angeles.

LONG PAUSE

Me: Well, yeah, I’m east coast then, like…

Joolz: Oh, from where?

Me: Oh, you know…New York…

Joolz: Seriously? New York? Like the city itself? Manhattan?

Me: Okay…no…sort of…well…more like Connecticut…but um….

Joolz: I should get back to work.

I slunk back onto the stage to stand like a mannequin in a spotlight for the next six hours, my metaphorical English-language balls heavy and blue with unrequited longing. After that, I put it out of my mind. If one were to let oneself feel down after every unsatisfying encounter with a fellow American in Berlin, despair would quickly take hold…

Two months later, right after Xmas, I got a phone call while shopping for a dish drying rack in IKEA. It was Joolz. She asked if I’d be willing to give her piano lessons.

Well, I was broke, had a piano and knew how to play. “Sure”, I told her.

Joolz began coming over once a week for a piano lesson. At about the third lesson, we discovered our common love of shitty red wine. At the fourth lesson, I don’t believe we made it to the piano.

Shortly thereafter, we interned together on another opera at the KO…where we met another American intern. We found him to be so remarkably distasteful, that we spent many of our free moments during the production conjecturing fantasy scenarios for this young man that generally ended with him being generally scorned, humiliated outright, or being severely beaten by midget amputees….

A friendship was thus formed.

Since then, Joolz and I have been on many adventures. We’ve crashed opulent catholic ceremonies on the island of Mallorca, as well as Luaus on Maui. We’ve made general cackling jackasses of ourselves at various fleamarkets, opera galas, house parties and family gatherings. We’ve gotten ourselves ruinously fucked up, come up with genius ideas that would make us both rich and famous…only to forget them the next morning. We’ve shared a bed for weeks at a time (and that bed happened to hang 2 meters above the ground)…

And we’ve gone months without seeing each other. You see…Joolz left Berlin about a year ago. About eight months before I left the city. She works in Los Angeles now. I work in…well…lets just not talk about it.

Still, it was just hot to see her again. When she turned the corner in the shitty hostel bar I for some reason chose, it was like seeing some part of myself again…some part I hadn’t seen for ages, but never doubted was there.

Although we’re together again, in our old, dirty neighborhood in our old dirty city…we didn’t sign up for a screamer of a night. We’re sitting in her apartment now, leaving our cheap bodega wine untouched. She’s writing an email to her bosses back in LA…and I’m watching her bounce absently on a big rubber ball…with nothing better to do than write about it.

There are worse things, though.

Well…it’s way too early to say, really.

It’s funny. Just when you think that innocent, insatiable part of yourself has either atrophied, turned black and wilted off from gangrene or was blown off in the Viet Cong jungles of your last relationship…it re-emerges with an intensity than alternates between breathtaking and horrifying.

I had been single for exactly two months to the day when I was invited to the impromptu birthday get-together of a colleague at the opera. It was there at this small party when I met him.

The idea of Him has puzzled my tiny, frought brain for a long time. The him I met at the party certainly bares scant resemblance to the archetypal Him in my mind. Still, that didn’t stop me from chasing down his number from the administrative offices the next day. I called. We met. I went to rehearsal. We met again that very evening. We spent the next day together. The day after I flew to Graz. Calls and texts. I went to Colgne to visit him. We drove back to Stuttgart. We spent days and nights rolling around and then dazedly leaving my apartment to forage for food and booze. Life continues so….

And it couldn’t be more fabulous.

You know the story: Hot guys on the street check you out (because you’re glowing like a Chernobyl trout), and you don’t even give it a second thought. Your jeans begin to hang off of you, because eating suddenly seems as foreign as communal cow-worship in the Ganges. Bedtime looks better than Hanukkah, your birthday, and spring break all rolled into one sweaty package.

There’s a charmed moment at the beginning of every affair when the him in question actually is, for all intents and purposes, Him. Any distinction disappears. He becomes Him and ceases to be him…

Still, for the battered, war-weary relationship junkies of Generation Y, the Santa Claus of new love is followed closely by the shadow of a vindictive and terrifying Knecht Ruprecht (look it up). When will the perfect, beautiful apparition of Him begin to separate from his new host…leaving you staring silently across the restaurant table at another pathetic, annoying, creature…whom you know too well but wish you didn’t. When will the point come when your only comfort, and an empty one at that, is knowing that the him that used to be Him doesn’t know you at all…

…and probably never did.

Still, maybe what makes flowers beautiful is the knowledge that one day they’ll wither and rot. They sure do smell nice there at the beginning though, don’t they…

At the moment, I’m listening to the radio and dreaming about killing myself.

The Rush Limbaugh show just ended, and now there’s a shitty program reviewing a book about Christian child rearing.

In the last hour, I’ve heard phrases like “drive-by media” and “Steelers cum Mets paradigm”.

These are just a few of the gleaming gems one can frequently hear on the United States Military radio broadcast. In case anybody was wondering, the public voice of the U.S. Military in Europe is as closed-minded, gospel-spewing, and monosyllabic as one might expect of any other armed-services outfit.

This might sound harsh, but I might be more inclined to support our troops if they didn’t sound like such complete retards.

Anyway.

I’m not listening to this anti-intellectual sludge with any sort of relish. The thing is this: for me, having the option of an English-filled environment is really important. One of the most effective ways of creating this environment is via radio.

In Berlin, my radio clearly received the BBC World Service. The World Service is the gold standard of English-language broadcasting, heard in across all seven continents, featuring eloquent translations from some forty languages.

The World Service is like sitting in the company of several people you greatly respect…listening in awe at the unfamiliar yet brilliant point being made…with style and wit….as opposed to the Military broadcast, which is like overhearing two drunk hicks exchanging banalities whilst urinating through the chain-link fence behind the local 7/11.

The fucked up thing is this…were I in Kinshasa, Vladivostok, Havana or Seoul…I could easily find the World Service on the radio. In Stuttgart, however…not so much. Not on FM, AM or short-wave.

So it’s Dr. Laura Schlesinger, Pat Robertson and Sean Hannery for me.

The internet you ask? Nope, my bandwidth won’t support the BBC feed. It’s barely wide enough to transmit my own idiotic musings to you poor people.

So I’m in Graz at the moment. Nothing to do with the opera this time. I was invited by a friend of mine, a well-known and oft-published American visual artist, to facilitate a performance piece he’s been invited to present as part of the renowned Steirischer Herbst festival.

The professional, high-brow art scene is, sadly, totally impenetrable to me. I mean, throw a book about Peggy Guggenheim or Clement Greenberg at me and I can get through it. Joyfully, even. I’ve seen the work of Charles Saatchi’s stable both in Brooklyn and in London, and wound up powerfully effected by what I saw. Put me on a sleek white leather couch beside and across from curators, practitioners and admirers of arty art art art, however, and my guts start to automatically churn from the level of navel-gazing and frothy heights of self-righteous observatory hyperbole batted about within the improbably well-dressed group.

It always impresses me that the steadfast assertion of originality always ends up yielding certain stereotypes. In this crowd, are a few constant presences, no doubt duplicated in other similar manifestations in most other art clusters. The dour but wiltingly encyclopedic woman in her forties, dressed entirely in black or gray (ditto the hair)…which would create the disorienting impression (with the assistance of skin which actually may never have seen sun) of a living black and white photo—were it not for the shock of perfectly applied china red lipstick. There’s also the slim and tailored, perfectly coiffed and unmistakably homosexual power-player, capable of conducting six different meetings with ten different people, literally at the same time. One mustn’t forget the architecturally frozen hair and EU 800 glasses frames. There’s also mildly Latin-looking sporty guy who never smiles, snide, overweight British guy who gesticulates like a tarmac controller and talks to my tits as if they could possibly regurgitate theories on the “modernity of access”, and tall, pale stick-like female intern who nods a lot.

To me, this entire thing seems like the “extreme sports” of mental stamina. Today, I heard a panel discussion in which no respondent could produce more than eleven words in a minute. There was a lot of throat clearing, self-conscious pushing of tastefully greasy hair away from furrowed brows and searching gazes into some unidentified distance…but nothing that would keep me from shoving shards of broken glass into my rectum, were there some available.

I am jonesing so hard right now for America’s funniest home videos, hair metal videos, a clear mental picture of an orangutan jerking off to circus music…or basically anything that doesn’t mention Deleuze at least once every other eleven word minute.

They say that the general public is a dirty animal.

Thank Jesus.

After several “are you dead?” emails from friends and strangers alike, I feel compelled to explain why I’ve left the Kittensnake to wilt for a spell.

Within the last three weeks, I’ve remounted two operas, Hänsel und Gretel in Stuttgart and Madame Butterfly in Berlin. During this time, I also directed a reworking of a performance experiment I developed in Berlin in 2003…a bizarre pantomime to accompany Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. This was performed as part of the Staatsoper Stuttgart’s opening festivities.

Being back in Berlin was not the warm, perfumed bath I’d expected. Besides the obscene amount of work I had to put into Butterfly, I fell back into annoying tendencies that I’d hoped were slowly waning. Late nights of hanging out and drinking. Too much booze. Too much grass. Too many late night döners and way too many hangovers.

As I dragged myself through my fifth or sixth consecutive day of feeling like migrainy shit, plans were made to hang out with an old friend that evening. “Do you have any green?” I asked him. He didn’t. “Do you think you could try to score some before we hang tonight?” I asked. He said he would.

I was sitting outside of a bar in Kreuzberg with my main homo Toby, when the afore mentioned friend ambled toward us. “Dude, what happened to your eye?”

This friend leveled his gaze at me and calmly recounted how he’d gotten the living shit beaten out of him while trying to score in Görlitzer Park. As he came closer, I could see that both eyes, and one of his ears were already turning an angry purple shade. Toby and I spent the next four hours shuttling him around to several area hospitals…giving fake names and addresses to cover for the fact that my friend is uninsured.

As I sat in the emergency waiting room at the Virchow Clinic in Wedding, watching the clock near 3 A.M., knowing that my next rehearsal would begin in seven hours…I began to feel really sick.

It was the saturation point. I’ve spent so long trying to be everything. A cool, unscrupulous urban artist. A house assistant. A New Yorker. A European. A fiancee. An adult. A remorseless kid. Friend and counselor to dreamers, junkies, emotional cripples, neurotics, opera singers, filmmakers, performance artists, impatient people….unhappy people…

It was in that moment that I became really grateful for the opportunity I have in Stuttgart. I would even go so far as to say that I ached for Stuttgart in that moment. I wanted to be in that beautiful apartment, with my boring evening tea, reading the NY Times on the internet and going to bed. I wanted to be on the rehearsal stage in Stuttgart forming something, shaping something…I wanted order, accomplishment, accountability….

I’d had enough. I’d had so much more than enough. It was then that I knew I was done with Berlin.

Or at least the Berlin I’ve known for the last four years.

You know, I thought I’d miss it more.

Everybody hates going to the dentist. 51% of civilized society dreads a visit to the gynecologist, while the other 49% lies awake in anxious anticipation of the next day’s prostate exam. Tax day is also really shitty. Ditto the first of the month, for the rent-paying populace. Nobody gets off on getting their car booted or landing their sneaker in a fresh pile of dog shit. Pregnancy scares are also kind of the pits. Same goes for finding a pube in your polenta.

All of the afore-mentioned aggravations are nothing, I tell you, NOTHING compared to a visit to Berlin’s Ausländerbehörde. This is the meat-packing plant in which they process the city’s foreign residents.

The building lies on a remote tract of land inaccessible to all public transportation, thus allowing refugees the cleverly ironic exercise of hiking miles to apply for aid or shelter. In a city full of architectural wonders like self-hydrating moss farms on roofs that cool temperatures and insulate from sun damage, and self-cleaning windows and toilets, Berlin’s city planners have really outdone themselves in trying to recreate a real “third-world-feel” in the Ausländerbehörde. The waiting room walls are stained and rotting, decades-old garbage is still caked to wastebins, therefore creating a stale and fishy odor throughout the dark, damp hallways, perhaps meant to create the nostalgic aroma of an old, unclean vagina in whatever ethnic groups might appreciate that sort of thing. At least in the women’s bathrooms, there are neither toilet seats nor toilet paper. What there were, of course, were browning, cracked posters of grinning teenagers with Farrah Fawcett hairdos, encouraging me to visit KadeWe.

This was my fifth trip to the Ausländerbehörde, however it felt like the thousandth. The first time I went, in September of 2002, I was put in the “white line”…a disturbing classification system that separated immigrants from such countries as Australia, Iceland and then-Estonia from residents of Africa, the middle East and most of Asia. The latter group, of course, formed the “brown line”. Our orderly, pale-faced cue moved along swiftly and without incident, while we watched the unfortunate members of the other line stand for hours amid screeching babies, and the wheezing, hacking elderly.

After America invaded Iraq, U.S. Citizens were unceremoniously, and I believe somewhat vindictively reassigned to the “brown line”. This I discovered on my third trip to the Ausländerbehörde, in March of 2004. That time, at least I got to watch a middle –aged couple from Togo make out for about seven hours straight.

Once I started working for a living in Germany, I became eligible for appointments, that is to say, a specific arrival time and location dictated by the immigration officials, that should theoretically yield a shorter, smoother, and less pungent experience.

During these appointments, immigrants are separated by first letter of last name. The Si-Z lady is actually pretty nice. She chain-smokes like, and employs the same eye-makeup philosophy as the aged Bette Davis. She usually just takes a look at my documents, grunts, and passed them on, now yellowed and reeking to the sticker-in-your-passport office.
Not every appointment experience is quite so charmed, however. I know for a fact that the woman responsible for the letter D (and to be sure, most people who work for the Ausländerbehörde) is a vitriolic Xenophobe. My heterosexual life partner was tragically squeezed out of Berlin, due in part to the efforts of this dragon.

See, Ol’ Smokey doesn’t really give a shit, (thank Jesus), but most immigration-processing employees are trained to ask questions like the following, when confronted with a hardworking, upwardly mobile foreigner clutching an application for a work permit: “Why couldn’t a German do this job?”

For us expats, it’s a difficult question to answer. We come up with shit like: “My translation skills are necessary for this contract.” or “I’m the only girl willing to do DVDA in this whole uptight country”. What we really want to say is “This employer couldn’t find a German willing to wake-up, bathe, leave the house and make it to work before noon.” and “even if they could, their wage wouldn’t beat what that German is getting from the government to write poetry and snort crystal.”

Anyway. A few months ago, I got an unexpected letter from the Ausländerbehörde, announcing an appointment that unfortunately would fall during my time in the U.S. this summer. I called them and frantically begged to change the time and date.

They offered me October 2 at 7:00 A.M. The meeting would precede a rehearsal with full chorus and soloists on the Komische Oper stage at 10, and a full run-through of the Butterfly at 2. Fucking tight, in any case. So, I woke up at 5 in the morning on the day, after having hauled all of my bank documents, insurance forms, former immigration receipts and work papers up from Stuttgart the day before, and set out on the long journey to that most detested of places.

At around 6:30, while walking a desolate, uninhabited stretch of industrial wasteland, I caught my first glimpses of the Ausländerbehörde, rising gray and ominous like the death star, above the canals. While I waited at the “people with appointments” door, a fist fight broke out between a young-ish Turkish woman who’d cut in front of an older Romanian man, in anticipation of the building’s opening at 7.

While being batted around between four separate offices, I couldn’t think how grateful I am to be in possession of the big three important traits, as seen by Germans controlling immigration. Germanlookingness, the ability to speak German with as little accent as could ever be asked of an immigrant, and a talent for feigning unbelievable amounts of undeserved gratitude.

At around nine, and about twenty minutes after a short shouting match with a small Thai woman that told me to “shut the fuck up”, I was called into a dingy, water-stained office. The Si-Z lady was no where in sight.

“Ms. Steier, it appears you’ve been able to work in Germany now for about three years.”

“That’s right.”

“Well then, you don’t really need a work permit do you?”

“No, not really.”

The man and woman in the office appeared perplexed. “Well, why are you here?”

I felt like vomiting. “Well, you people sent me this letter, see…”

“Yes, that seems to be true. There’s just not really anything we need to do with you just now.”

The room was spinning. I had been awake for over two hours when the sun had risen that morning. My chorus would be arriving at the opera just then…”could you at least extend my visa?” I sputtered.

The woman looked at my passport. “No Ms. Steier. There’s still too much time left on the one you have.” She pushed her large glasses up her wide nose some, “It looks like you’ll need to come back in twelve weeks.”