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

Sickle race for theatrical space.

 

The Berlin Wall is an extravagant Soviet song dance number where “Break On Through the Other Side” with Igor Morrison of the Defecting Doors on lead vocals brings the utopian crowd to their feet, while the Bolshevik Beach Boys belt out in perfect harmony “Ukraine Surfin’ USSR”

 

“Don’t Cry for me Czechoslovakia” will bring tears to eyes. Hell, just trying to spell Czechoslovakia made my head rotate in a 360 degree demonic possession spin. It’s duck & cover showbiz, kids. It’s the Eagle & the Bear… get your tickets today and relive the nostalgia of the Red Scare and nuclear annihilation. Now those were fun days….

 

“Sibyll, dammit this cold war is making me hot!”

 

She laughed and grabbed me by the balls….”You my American man are always in heat. I did bring the handcuffs so be patient. We work now you gorvel later, ha!” Damn I love when she gets all Gestapo on me!!!

Chapter Eleven - Chaos at the Carnival

Chapter Eleven

Chaos at the Carnival

We eventually did produce a musical with Cold War panache and flavor, if nuclear annihilation  is your cup of radiation tea, but today in East Berlin things began to fall apart faster than a cheapo Sears Roebuck suit off the rack.   We had the agents swap places and were ready to wrap up the circus when all hell broke loose.

 

Not a good day to have the KGB prowling around. Unknown to us until  Horst Scheiss ran up to us screaming and screeching! It seems the ventriloquist dummies and marionettes  had been shooting up good Marseille heroin, no doubt purchased in the French sector from a sleazy waterfront pervert wearing a purple fez beanie copter.  All five were nodding off in the Dog Face Woman’s tent. Needle tracks ran up and down their arms while they puffed hungrily on long stemmed Chinese fortune cookie opium pipes while the Turkish belly dancers pranced around topless playing Broadway show tunes  with their finger cymbals.

 

Worse yet, the hand puppets were jacking off the puppet crew,  while Punch and Judy were snorting cocaine and swearing in front of the children who sat silently afraid to move a muscle!

 

Even the Siamese Twins were there eating bricks of hashish shot from gigantic Pez dispensers that made their heads spin out of control in opposite directions as they recited Sanskrit poetry  about camels in heat mounting Lawrence of Arabia.

 

The jugglers were in the next tent tossing around shrunken heads of Evangelical missionaries obtained from the Pygmies from the Congo  and Jehovah Witnesses they found in a steamer trunk of the notoriously queer Samoan strongman who kept a midget on a leash for a pet.

 

The mimes were turning tricks for the carnival barkers with more tattoos than teeth yellowed by nicotine. The mimes were all lined up in a row, sexual dominoes ready to fall into  Fellatio’s Inferno. (Leopoldo Fellatio was a writer for the Vatican but was beheaded when he referred to it as the Vatican’t.) The trouble with mimes is that they are so quiet you never know if they had an orgasm or not.

 

The clowns were crazed on methamphetamines trying to fuck the merry go round horses going up and down to organ music renditions of The King and I, while the cone headed human pincushion man hammers nails into his head  while inhaling DDT and roach killer in a spray can while exposing himself to the group of Dominican nuns in wheelchairs, all victims of a hit and run by a drunken school bus driver who thought they were bowling pins and his bus was a big ball.

 

His average was 250...after he knocked down all the nuns, he  knew he had the high score for pedestrian bowling... a record that would stand for a decade until an Amtrak jumped the tracks in downtown Chicago into St. Vincent’s Church during a First Communion of Hungarian immigrant children whose parents slaughtered cows at the stockyards for a living.

 

The East German secret police and Soviet KGB agents  who only had sex on Lenin’s birthday discovered the debauchery just as we did. Things took a turn for the worse when one of the sex crazed mimes was found having sex with an inflatable Karl Marx doll!

 

That was it….the East German authorities came down on us faster than a blow job by a J. Edgar Hoover vacuum cleaner. We were all rounded up, the patrons were hustled back to their one room apartments, while we were taken to the former Hermann Goering Ministry of Justice where you are guaranteed a fair trial followed by death by firing squad.

 

Goddamned sex crazed mimes and junkie puppets!

 

Chapter Twelve - Rearview Mirror of the 60's

Chapter Twelve - The Rearview Mirror of the 60’s

Throughout the Sixties. Sibyll and I were caught up in the whirlwind of events overtaking Europe. In ‘68 we were in Paris marching in the street in the largest revolt in a democratic country at the time. It brought the government down, while the government went about it’s daily business bashing in  heads yet at the same time because of it their reactionary actions were uniting the French workers, students and general public. Unlike in America where protest was creating a generational war, Europe united. America was love it or leave it, Europe was join together we are ONE. Regarding the counter culture and change in America of the Sixties...John Lennon said.. “We blew it!”

 

While San Francisco became ground zero for the counterculture in the late Sixties, Sibyll and I were off and running in Jolly Olde England,  which was a compost pile of quaint Quant, mods on Vespa scooters, rockers on Marlon Brando Harleys, Arthur Treachers fish and chips, the dashing little Mini Cooper (as opposed to Alice Cooper) George Bernard Shaw, Professor Higgins  and Eliza Doolittle not to forget Peter O’Toole and Peter Sellers. Carnaby Street not as bleak as the Berlin Wall Strasse. Union Jacks galore, James Bond and Pussy Galore, and not one damned Hammer and Sickle, and the Queen was more vibrant than Willy Brandt!  

 

We got  our political street feet wet in the Sixties  in Holland, Amsterdam to be exact. Move over Merry Pranksters! Before the clock struck midnight at Cinderella's counterculture ball, we in Europe were well ahead of the Merry Pranksters acid tests that helped define the "hippie" gen. In addition to our art gallery in West Berlin we got ourselves Amsterdamned as the damned Dutch were already flying eight miles high and light years ahead of hippie happenings and behemoth be-ins where Hunter's buffalo roamed and Ginsberg Om'd. Remember the Happenings and Human Be-Ins in America in the late 60's? The Provo's were having Happenings and Be-ins as early as 1963...the American counter culture followed shortly afterwards in the the wake of the counterculture awakening of Europe.

 

At one point to exploit media attention to marijuana reform the Provo's rented a bus to travel Europe to spread the gospel of ganja...again...before Kesey and Further took to the rolling paper road. The Provo's crossed borders and kept the bowls full of illegal substances and meticulously hid the "real shit" when coming to a border crossing

Make no mistake, these were the original  protest punks who packed a sociological punch with a winken blinken and nod to the Marquis de Sade and loaded to the Dr. Benbay max with a hyper hypodermic needle full of the illogically logical absurdity of Dadaism that eventually tore the fabric of Dutch society where dykes could live harmoniously along dikes...weed was freed and prostitution was now the legal norm as the legal tender loins enticed and entranced.

 

Sibyll and I had been in jail in West and East Berlin..can’t do one without the other. The food was better in the West, but the East was by far way ahead when it came to cockroaches.

 

Now as the Sixties disappeared in the rearview mirror of history we found ourselves in 1974 back in West Berlin, only this time we were in the delivery room at a West Berlin hospital. Sibyll was pregnant with twin proletarians that we managed to pinpoint were conceived on our spiritual trek for peace and hashish in Tibet the previous year. We always enjoyed our sex, but to fuck at 14,000 plus feet in a yurt on the village of Babar was a dream. The first time we had sex was when we met in the states and we drove together from NYC to camp out in Death Valley. Maybe it was the acid and weed,  but we did screw below sea level and didn’t need a snorkel or rubbers.

 

Since then we’ve done it at every geographic highlight we could find….One night in the dark hidden behind the base of the Eiffel Tower and one night outside in the bushes of Buckingham Palace!

 

We were still running the gallery which had gotten more avant garde over the years,  in fact almost pure Dadaist and our focus now was new artists for arts sake along with our new program of bringing art and theater outside with more public performances and encouraged the graffiti and mural art that was beginning to appear on the West side of the Berlin Wall...a political statement in itself.

 

Now we had to focus on being parents. Twins were one the way. A boy and girl! We even discussed if we should get married or not. We had always felt it was an establishment ploy to keep attorneys busy in case of divorce and we didn’t need a piece of paper to seal or love...but now….babies...children...What the hell...it was the 70’s now…. And all we had to fear was Disco!

 

Chapter Thirteen - Diapers & Revolution

 

Chapter  - Thirteen

Diapers and Revolution

We named the twins, Guntar and Ingrid, after