Berlin Walls, Hipsters & Haikus, Mike Marino [the false prince series TXT] 📗

her limbs and assemble them on a plywood board canvas with hammer and nails in a juxtaposed, just suppose position all helter skelter and call her a Picasso.

Conrad was next to arrive wearing sequins in his hair as he trotted in with his 13 year old wife who was also his sister!. “Incest is best,” he always said. He usually  brought in homeless kids, but gave it up after falling in deep mad mad love with his sisters collection of dolls that let him have his way with their plastic parts.

The parade continued as Keeley, an androgynous female poet with short jet black close cropped hair who appeared sometimes bald was the first to offer up a toast. “To the future...your future, our future, their future!” Which was all Peter Kopek needed. He was  our resident fag queer poet as he referred to himself proudly, “There you go you cantankerous whore. Stealing from Kerouac again! I wouldn’t let you give me a blow job if I was bursting at the seams with a full tank of semen while you recite Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis” while you play with your own tits.”

The strange thing was...I think Keeley and Peter made a great match. Both perfectly bitchy and caustic, not just to each other, but aimed their barbs at anyone they chose depending on their moods, but seemed to take great delight in parry and thrust antics designed to draw verbal blood from each other. She somewhat manly in bearing and he a mincing marvel of  boy-man.

The rest of the group included Corinne, the evil folksinger who was determined at all parties to pick up her guitar and regale us with downer songs of death and disaster.  If we were in a benzedrine mood, she was a musical barbiturate. If we were in a 78 RPM frame of mind, her needle would be stuck at 33 ⅓. IF the song asked "where have all the flowers gone?" She'd tell you they died of plant polio after they were doused in DDT and the neighborhood began having birth defect babies.

Collin Murphy was a hulking mick from Dublin who we suspected had IRA ties and had to hide out in the melting pot of Berlin’s art colony. He was one hell of a writer and fancied himself the next George Bernard Shaw. Limericks with a degree of tongue in chic tongue in cheek bawdiness were his specialty when not writing his novel regarding sex crazed Catholic  leprechauns from Ulster or the Happy Easter Rebellion.

The rest of gang was an assortment of both genders and cross gendered cross dressers, bisexual street hustlers and young male and female  junkies who had certain other talents from the artistic to the carnal pleasures and ready to go to bed with man or woman or both which suited the rest of the group perfectly. “I’ll trade you two haikus for an ass fuck!”

It was all Cabaret meets The Boys in the Band that would eventually end up as one large contortionist orgy while we ran a bootleg 8MM copy of “Fantasia” backwards on the wall while getting it on in a group grope to the sight of dancing brooms and singing mops.

Berlin, 1965 where anything goes… Chapter Three - Fishnets, Garters & Gangsters

 

Chapter- Three

Fishnets, Garters and Gangsters

We were now dressed, me in my  faded jeans, grey wine stained sweatshirt and my old Salvation Army field jacket, Sibyll in her cutoffs as it was warm today, and a t-shirt that fit snugly to her body with the famous JFK message  'Ich bin ein Berliner'...not East...not West...just ..BERLIN!

 

We grabbed my canvas daypack, loaded it with Agfa black and white film to photograph the recent construction of phase three of the Berlin Walls Darwinian evolution from a mere tangle of barbed wire to a  wall of concrete, rebar, and a crown tiara of concertina wire.

 

Quickly Drained a quick last drop of left over warm wine from the night before and opened the apartment door ready to dash about where before our eyes stood in a ready to knock pose, a one legged dwarf with an Errol Flynn Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckling pirate patch over the empty socket of what would have been a perfectly good left eye, lost in an altercation during a knife fight in a bar brawl in Hamburg during a Rory Storm and the Hurricanes show. The purple fez upon his head made him look like a Turkish Pez Dispenser.

 

“Good morning, Sir,” he spoke in broken English with a gutsy German accent. “I was sent by a gentleman, who would like to meet you this fine morning, and you too ma’am. He is  a certain Mr. Sydney Australia,” he said with his voice raising a pitch as he spoke the hallowed name. “My name is Joel Faberge. Mr. Australia would like the pleasure of your company Sir, along with your  lady friend to discuss, um, a matter of a mutual and beneficial nature to both parties, n’est-ce pas?” First he fractures English, and now plants his linguistic flag on sovereign French soil!

 

He was indeed a Pez dispenser dispensing dialects and phrasing as easily as a the little tart candies themselves.  Strange little fellow..downright creepy in fact...reminded me of someone I knew in the past. A bookish fellow, yes, an  immigrant from Borneo who owned a bookstore and was arrested for selling the Alice B. Toklas Anarchist and Chocolate Chip Manifesto Cookbook, and primarily for taking hidden camera movies of 8MM sex in hotel rooms.  

 

We followed the little fellow down the Yellow Brick Strasse to  the luxury apartment of one, Sidney Australia. The Lollipop guild was alive and well I thought. Sibyll held my arm tightly. Something was wrong here, but we were both curious and forgot that curiosity killed the cat, not to mention the milk truck that ran it over on Easter Sunday.

 

Something wasn’t sitting right with me about this. I had heard of Herr Australia before, and none of it good. Black marketing in vice. White slavery, dope dealing, some even said he smuggled toilet paper to Moscow at one point and provided Stalin with Serbian hookers who used bikini wax on each other in public at train stations. He also   mainly was afflicted with a love of the arts and gambling.

 

Going to meet him against my better judgement was a gamble in and of itself. Loved those huge Rubenesque paintings where the women had breasts the size of large bowling balls and enough flesh on the fanny to accommodate the entire range of the Alps.  

 

We finally arrived at Thirteen Otto von Bismarck Strasse and the elegant  if not over ornate Hotel Eva Braun. My first impression was that we had entered a time warp of a bunker of tawdry, faded Weimar Republic wallpaper and dusty chandeliers . All that was missing was a few suicide victims.

 

Let me paint this picture for you. (Takes a deep breath) Sidney Australia was the Genghis Khan of glitz and glitter holding  court with his mincing minions of Mongol malcontents. He was the gangsters gangsta. He would trade in white slavery, illegal Ukranian drugs,  murder for hire, blackmail and extortion. He would play both sides and there was a price for everything….a steep price.

His apartment was, well, gaudy as hell,  with a decadent overkill feeling of a faux Ottoman Empire Sultan. His penthouse overlooked the elevated metropolis cityscape of the art decadence Fritz Lang inspired Berlin. The decor was  a cross between an old 19th Century Turkish harem and a cheap shag carpeted motel room that charges by the hour found in North Beach in san Francisco. You know the place, we all do. A real Motel Six for sex. Everything was done with an overabundance of chintzy  purple haze curtains, The kind aging strippers emerge from after the dirty comic finishes his routine and the Tenderloin losers hide their masturbation under cover of a raincoat.

 

Strobe lights pulsed suggestively from hidden recessed spaces in the room while a dozen or so strategically placed blacklight strobes  undulated doing a pole dance on the black light enhanced walls. Sidney referred to his abominable abode as a cerebral antebellum….I looked as a William Burroughs pharmacological funny farm with a homosexual surreal reality.

The retro  furniture was overstuffed,  as was our host, so when you sat down you were immediately reminded of a suicide bean bag ride at the amusement park on the moon.


We were about to behold...behold? We weren’t quite sure what we were to behold. Also, I just like the word, no one says that anymore. It’s a crying shame.

 

Sidney’s bulk   entered the room with I have to admit fabulous  flair and fanfare, not to mention while he sang a syrupy selection of Broadway show tunes  to music piped in karaoke style over loudspeakers hidden, decibel snipers waiting for a target for his butchering of the greasepaint greats.    

 

Sibyll  and myself were both startled.  It was showtime as Sidney appeared from behind a curtain I hadn’t noticed before, dressed regally in a full tent Marlon Brando-Fat Elvis kaftan complete with a full face of  makeover make-up singing popular show tunes.
Expecting to see an arch criminal with pinky rings, instead we came face to face with a rotund planet of man in spiked heels, a see through teddy with garters, and mesh stockings. I felt  I was at a transgender summer camp of gender bending frivolity at Frankie's Fantasyland Bar and Grill!

He could have been a gay diva from Mars.  He was bizarre, no question about that, and his voice I have to admit..stellar and  faster than a speeding falsetto...he could bend a Ethel Merman high note in his bare hands.

He had an operatic rock and roll voice and was sporting a turquoise  outer limits outer space high piled a mile high pompadour hair-do that looked like he just stepped out of flamboyant flying saucer cabaret with a cadre of gay aliens and bi-sexual bi-pods. It was the Mikado meets Hermann Goering in eyeliner in a Berlin Bunker. It's "The Day the Earth Stood Still" with Major Tom screaming at ground control. a It's Queer Eye for the Space Guy!



His kingdom was a fairyland...literally, no macho factory assembly lines in  this place as it catered to an assortment of dykes who arrived by bike, intellectual drag queens, street people, the wealthy from the world of art , writers, drunks, junkies, who wandered in and out of lucidity among the collective mass of West Berlin’s social substrata of masturbation and creativity, and creative masturbation. You need to have your card punched to gain entree to this world.

He tossed in a few jokes with his routine. Why not? Jesus did stand up before Seinfeld, gigging at gatherings doing a magic act with parlor tricks and sanctimonious schtick, like that  whole loaves of bread and fishes thing which led to a string of bookings and spoken word performances throughout the Roman Empire. (I heard he stole the Bread and Fishes routine from Rodney Dangerous Maximus who first wowed the crowd while touring the Bibleland with Moses and Abraham, the first of the comedy trios, (pre-dating Larry, Moe and Curly) who played to packed houses of