Berlin Walls, Hipsters & Haikus by Mike Marino (superbooks4u .txt) 📖

Philistines  in their prime)




He waved us to sit down with a gesture of his hands that was more of a flourish than an invite.

 

“Thank for coming. I must say it is a pleasure to meet at last. I wish to speak to you about going into East Berlin for, ah, to pick something up for me of great importance. In return I guarantee your gallery will not receive any more trouble such as the nasty explosion yesterday.”

 

Son of a bitch! It wasn’t the skinheads after all. The wily old queen had us bombed and now was blackmailing us. Sibyll caught the same message and her eyes got as wide as the Danube.

 

“Of course there is some danger involved and you might if not careful end up in the Stasi Prison system which would be unfortunate.” Two of his thugs then emerged with Lugers in hand behind us wearing only  fishnet stockings and chastity belts. We had been had.

 

“I will send along one of my agents to guide you so it should go smoothly yes?”

 

What choice did we have. We could die now in West Berlin or at least prolong our lives thanks to the wonders of torture at the hands of the East German police where torture was perfected to such a degree they were pure artists, Rembrandts all when it came to sadism.

 

“Appears we have no choice Herr Australia.”

“Ha” he guffawed….(guffaw … another word no one uses today!) No sir, you do not!”

Chapter Four - The Amusement Park Hustle

 

Chapter - Four

The Amusement Park Hustle

Sibyll and I now had no choice but still we had no clue as to the “mission” the old queen wanted us to accomplish. That was about to become crystal clear as we were to meet our “guide” who would fill us in on the project.

 

We were told to meet him at the old Der Park Der Leute, the Peoples Park, which once was the coming of age place for pubescent Hitler Youth, now merely an abandoned amusement park with its rusting ferris wheel, the Bunker of Love ride and of course die Wilde Maus roller coaster  that more than once has had its past share of sheer terror screams as it careened wildly own the tracks.

 

We were scheduled to meet Horst Scheisse, Sydney’s top aide who in addition to handling the more delicate of matters, such as murder and art gallery bombings, was also a ventriloquist with a Marlene Dietrich dummy that many said under their breath of course, was his alter ego. “I vant to be alone!”

 

The park itself was a mere 50 yards from the Berlin Wall and the roller coaster and ferris wheel alone rose higher that the wall giving a full glimpse of East Berlin that could easily be watched for activity. Of course you would also be a sitting target  for an East German sharp shooter with a SG82 sniper rifle used by East German police and military units. Who the hell wants to die by a Soviet cartridge in the chamber. If I’m gonna get shot, make it a good old fashioned made in the USA Remington round.

 

“Here we go, Sibyll,” I said gently as we entered the vacant grounds looking for a psychotic ventriloquist (aren’t they all?)   

 

“It’s a good thing, we’re not stoned on acid,” she remarked. LSD was in its early stages of mass use among the masses. Soon it would become the Volkswagen of choice for drug usage especially here in Germany as it was developed in the Sandoz Labs in Switzerland, home of William Tell and hidden Jewish art and money the Nazis had stolen during the war. So much for neutrality!

 

I had to admit though, being high and munching on a bratwurst on a stick high on LSD and speed and walking through a psychedelic minefield of funhouse mirrors and strapping in for a roller coaster ride where I could look for flying dragons, invisible giant insects and hallucinatory  French erotica of Rubenesque lovelies in lingerie at peep shows grinding away in a field full of horses looking to go bareback in one position or another. Pony pornography on the farm or merely a French freak show?


Imagine if you ever took LSD and ride a roller coaster after seeing your distorted image in a funhouse mirror? I imagine it would confound and confuse Confucius after a day of meditating on a plane of spiritual meditating and levitating over the Yangtze River

 

I could hear the ghost voices of the past.

 

“Step Right Up Ladies and Gentlemen and children of all ages!” There’s something about  an amusement park that makes the tongue salivate for cotton candy and corn dogs, the heart pump fast in anticipation of a death defying ride on the Wild Mouse that could derail at a moment’s notice (now that’s entertainment!) or fuel injects the hormonal pump as the Tunnel of Love where you get to cop that first virgin feel of the girl next door.

 

The midway is alive at night with neon and music and barkers barking and hawking, three balls for a dollar, win a prize, be a man, step right up ring the bell and let me guess your weight.

 

The freak show alone would be worth the price of admission just to see the bearded lady pound nails into a midgets nose while he blows flame out of his ass. The rides are thrill packed as you don’t know if you’ll be stuck for 6 hours high atop a Ferris Wheel or end up riding the malfunctioning Jaws of Life Roller Coaster where an EMS unit with attendants dressed as circus clowns are ready to yell “CLEAR” once they’ve stopped the internal bleeding by stuffing salt water taffy into your wounds.

 

The Merry Go Round is a classic basically harmless ride for the little tykes...for we adult males there is the Mary Go Round, the hooker who sets sail on the Midway looking for locals who want to take a trip into her Tunnel of Love. She’s been around the block a few times or to borrow nautical terms...she now wants to ‘round your Horn! For ten bucks you can get laid in the trailer she shares with Long Wang the Chinese sword swallower and her swallows will delight your Capistrano.

 

It’s colorful, exciting, full of dangerous malfunctioning rides, potential for death by ptomaine Corn Dog poisoning, These are not reasons to avoid amusement parks . On the contrary….it’s the reason we go!

Then a very feminine sultry voice called out from behind a concession stand….”Willkommen meine Freunde..willkommen im Wunderland am Rhein. Ich bin Horst Scheisse.” It was our contact, Horst, or actually it was a Dietrich dummy,  Marlene trying to be the seductress of Oz.”

 

I leaned over to Sibyll and quietly said for her ears only. “Great... our guide and contact is a man named Horst Shit in English and  we have to get our instructions from a kinky transvestite dummy! Why don’t we just turn ourselves into the East German now as spies and get shot now!”

Chapter Five - Showtime In The Kill Zone

 

Chapter - Five

Showtime in the Kill Zone

Journal Entry of Einer Bjarnesen, Berlin, July 27, 1965

Danish Poet and Cross Dressing Mime from Copenhagen  

….Poetry pouring from a fast flowing syringe in some dark beat zen corner of Berlin where only the hipsters dare go, ergo, go go go, while the mime inhales coke up his mime  nose while writing beat prose with a loaded .38 in his hipster pocket ready to explode, firing a cartridge of powder and leaving a body cold in the alley face down,.one more fix should do the trick to give that electric jolt stimuli to the nervous system erasing fear creating words making rhyme for no reason, the counter-balance to an unbalanced society’s sobriety with sobriquets like word bouquets ready to adorn the unborn prom queen before she starts menstruation and has to be home to engage in sexual activity with her brothers who work the high wire under the big top while clowns strip off in the center ring making ready for the circle jerk…

 

Thanks to a ventriloquists heroin addicted Marlene Dietrich dummy we were now left with a jigsaw puzzle of an idea of our East Berlin Mission. It was Picasso all over. A limb cast asunder over there by the dumpster, a nose in the air floating with balloons over the genderless bordello and a leg lovingly wrapped around an empty torso of a male stripper with Nordic muscles.

 

Now we had to explain it to our dysfunctional family of artists. I could see it now. “OK gang, here’s the deal as explained to us by a second party libidinous piece of over sexed Bavarian maple wood and a man named Horst Shit as told to us in a defunct amusement park that was a prototype for a concentration camp for the Katzenjammer Kids.”

The meeting as usual, took place in the group nude mode  (gotta have tradition you understand) at 8 PM that evening in our the apartment libido laden living room.  It was time to scheisse or get off the toilet.

 

“OK, everyone. Listen up. Goddamn it. Chang! No playing eggroll with your pecker at least until we’re done. I may even join you, after all two heads are better than one.” Chang was a highly gifted rice paper artist and calligrapher a small village in Hunan Province, and loved to show off for the lesbians in the room for some reason while fondling  his long time underage Tibetan live in boy-wife from Canada he picked up a video arcade in Banff.

 

Sibyll caught the pass and ran with it from there. It was her country after all and she had the emotional barbells to inspire the others. They listened to her and paid rapt attention, broken English and all. “We were approach by a third party to be  spearhead of mission that could change the course of Germany’s future.”

 

“Well, at least we could prime the pump,” I explained.

“For years,” she continued, “both East and West Berlin have been spying on each other, dat is not surprise. To make long story short, we have been “invited” to go inside East Berlin as a circus troupe of jugglers, mimes and dat sort of ting. Along with us will be three undercover agents. One from the UK, one from US and one French. Who they will disappear from our ranks and assume their cover positions in the East. We will den be joined