Steve Erickson - These Dreams of You

“You know you can.”

“I need to get out of this steaming shit pile of a city,” he says with new intensity, “away from the coke, away from the pills. Away from the sirens, the fucking limos cruising the Strip. . get to Berlin where I can clean up—”

“Think they don’t have any drugs in Berlin, do you?”

“Yes, yes, I know — they have drugs bloody everywhere, don’t they? But Berlin is. . ” He ties his robe around him more tightly and for the first time doesn’t start over the record on the turntable. “. . attached to the rest of the western world by a thread of track and highway, like the balloon on the end of a string, isolated, besieged. Haunted, insolent, bold. Divided down the middle — like me . Listen, Jasmine. I need you to fly. . do you fly?. . to Frankfurt and take the train to Berlin and find a place for us to live. For you and me and Jim, I mean. Somewhere not too far from the Hansa studios. . do you know Hansa?”

“A German label, isn’t it?” she says.

“They have their own studio at the south end of the Wall so we need something accessible. Of course I’ll pick up your expenses and you’ll have a month to track down something simple, in an interesting part of town but functional, anonymous, where one can go to a market and buy tea. Nothing extravagant, nothing rock-star. I mean that. I’ve never meant anything more seriously.”

“Wait.”

“Jim and I will be in France a bit, another studio north of Paris where we’ll be laying some basic tracks. . but we’ll be coming—”

“Wait!”

“—by train and boat. What?”

She realizes she doesn’t know what. “Nothing.”

“Right, then. A new chapter! a new town, new career. . ”

“On one condition. . ”

“Oh yes, yes, I know,” he says impatiently, waving it away, “listen,” and in the brown light through the blinds he looks at her, “I can only guarantee that’s not my intention and I shall never, never, never. . ” he waves again. “Just. . I’ll never , that’s all. I’ll never. Whatever. Who knows, right, luv? And Jim’s a perfect gentleman, I might add, for a bloke who has the biggest cock in the history of rock and roll, and that includes Jimi.”

“Should I even ask how you know this?”

“Luv, everyone knows this.”

Within a single breathtaking hour she has in her possession a cashier’s check for $15,000. Bundling up the books and records she can’t bear to part with and sending them onto Berlin, Jasmine has the idea to give the rest to Kelly; but sitting in her car watching the house where she lived for three years, trying to summon up her courage, she hits the gas at first sight of the other woman. She listens for the tune of “Tezeta” coming from her womb, but hears nothing

She leaves like someone who’s set fire to the building. Spends the night in the car before dropping it off with the Korean couple to whom she’s sold it, then the last fifteen hours in the Lufthansa terminal waiting for her flight. When the plane stops over in London, she’s mildly startled that her old city fails to beckon; from Frankfurt she takes the train through the long hundred-mile outdoor tunnel that runs from West Germany to Berlin. She takes a room at a small hotel off the Kurfürstendamm and retrieves her books and records.

She writes to him, I’ve spent most of the past month familiarizing myself with a city that’s desperate and alive, and finally yesterday located a residence that I hope both you and Jim find adequate. It’s above a motor vehicle repair shop, very basic but comfortable enough, six or seven rooms with sky-blue walls and doors that open onto a small balcony overlooking a side alley. The floors are tile from before the War and there are carved high ceilings and a yard in front enclosed by an old iron gate. It’s in the Schöneberg district on the Hauptstrasse, a short ride on the U-Bahn from Hansa Tonstudio 2, and mostly the people are working-class Turks which means. . Turkish coffee! Christopher Isherwood lived in Schöneberg as well as Einstein, Marlene Dietrich, Billy Wilder, Klaus Kinski (cracked German actor I’ve not heard of but you probably have) and now someday someone shall write a letter to someone saying you lived here as well.

H ello, luv.

Quick note to let you know that Jim and I are here in the Chateau Heroesville (sp?) north of Paris in Pantoise working. Delighted to receive your letter and look forward to joining up with you in Berlin in the next week or so or as soon as Jim disentangles himself from his dalliance with a beautiful asian who rather inconveniently is married to a French actor. I suppose he shall get a good song out of it if nothing else. The flat sounds suitable indeed and as I believe has been said we don’t need or want anything luxurious. It is properly heated? is my only concern — the chateau where we record now is drafty and damp and I suppose I got more accustomed to all that detestable California sunshine than I realized, didn’t I, even if I never actually went out in it when I was there, ha ha. Since Kill City and its streets strewn with winged corpses we’ve partaken of nothing harder than vino, being the best boys we know how to be. I look forward to Berlin and living as much like a normal person as I can get away with.

Cheers, D

Should she note in a letter the bullet holes in the Hansa recording studio near the Wall? Will this be thrilling or frightening or both? In the International Herald Tribune she reads that in five years the assassin of Robert Kennedy will be up for parole; she can’t help regretting that he wasn’t executed, she who might have assumed herself opposed to executions. It’s not a matter of vengeance but rather some rightful order extracted from the anarchy of the world. Everything is personal.

When she goes to look for the clippings she’s kept these years, beginning with the first she read in London about the trip to South Africa and the others afterward that made their folded way from one volume to another, they’re nowhere to be found among any of her possessions. She’s filled with reproach at their loss. She thinks of the aging clippings hidden forever in L.A. with Kelly, who never will know of them unless one happens to flutter from some book she randomly opens. This is the price, believes Jasmine, of such a cowardly flight, of leaving a woman like a man would.

On their arrival in Schöneberg, Jasmine realizes the two singers haven’t entirely shed their bad habits so much as downscaled, trading drugs for garden-variety alcoholism. Methodically they carve up the calendar allowing for two days a week of prowling the clubs and bars and strip joints of Kreuzberg — the Exile, the SO36 overrun by German punks — then two days of calm and restitution at the flat, shaking off hangovers over coffee and books. The other three days are devoted to writing and recording at the studio within sight of the wall and its armed East German snipers, who are close enough to pick off one singer or the other and strike a singular blow against western decadence. For a while the two men and woman are tourists, driving in the Black Forest and visiting the Brücke museum, striking poses out of expressionist paintings and snapping photographs with a little polaroid camera picked up in a pawn shop. Sometimes the picture seems to vanish between the click of the shutter and the exposure of the negative; waving his hand, the flame-haired Old World wanderer given to believing such things says, “It’s in the air. A ghost camera, taking pictures of the Old World disappearing.”

“Yeah,” cracks Jim, “or a camera that doesn’t work.”