ex. On account of your Liebeskummer, I will forgive you that supper of Jägermeister.
For the next eight years, the closest I would get to Berlin would be my unpaid, uncredited (and correspondingly untrained and unqualified) work as a dramaturge, dialect coach, and prop master for an off-off-off-off-off-Broadway play called Berlin, which went up at the Tribeca Playhouse in the fall of 2001, in the shadow of the World Trade Center wreckage. Despite being an “equity showcase” put on by a bunch of then-amateurs, Berlin had a sold-out run. It was an awful, somber, unmoored time to be in New York, and people related to the beautifully written story, which itself took place amid rubble.
It was an improbable but redemptive romance between Heike, an aging ex-Nazi screen idol, and Bill, an American GI. And despite my substantial failure to coach the lead actress, Renata (whom you may recognize as different characters on about ninety-four episodes of Law & Order), to sound less like Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles, and despite my lackluster attention to replenishing the fake stage-whiskey, and despite the fact that it didn’t get me anywhere near actual Berlin, Berlin was also a rousing success for me personally. This was not just because I got the script changed when the playwright wanted the two leads to travel to a hotel “a couple hundred miles east” of Berlin, which is Poland. It was also due to the improbable and redemptive romance between the hot twenty-two-year-old prodigy who played the American GI and yours motherfucking truly.
In addition to being the unpaid and uncredited dramaturge, dialect coach, and prop-master, I was also the play’s sign-in manager on the day we auditioned for the male lead, Bill, a wide-eyed teenager who loves The Great Gatsby and is several measures out of his depth in the occupied, decimated German capital. We had Renata already, Madeline Kahn accent dialed all the way up, and I watched as Bill after Bill—all comely, overeager waiter-actors in their mid-to-late twenties—ambled onto the stage in the rented rehearsal space to read with her. They were all fine—you know, for actors. They read their lines with commitment; they made “choices” about the character (as they say in showbiz). But they were all still clearly acting, trapped in a mimetic performance (as they say in the academic biz).
“All right,” said Mark, the director, when yet another earnest but mediocre Bill left the stage. “That was great. We’ll call you.” He turned to me. “Anyone else?”
There was one more person on my list, but he was nowhere to be found. Maybe he’d heard Renata’s accent and skedaddled? I sprang up from my folding chair in the back and did my best self-important theatrical scamper out into the hall, where, sure enough, there was a guy with giant blue eyes, filthy blond hair, and almost impossibly delicate cheekbones, slumped down in one chair while his propped-up feet rested on another, headphones turned so high I could hear every word of what he was listening to, which was “Heart-Shaped Box” by Nirvana. From the looks of him, when that record came out he was in utero himself. He wasn’t handsome in the tanned, muscled, hairless, simultaneously-oversexed-and-sexless She’s All That teenybopper manner that was currently the rage in Hollywood—but he was arresting to look at. I touched him gently on the shoulder and he jumped. “Oh, sorry!” he said. “Am I up?”
I led him into the theater and he loped onto the stage. He sat down next to Renata and before he said a single word, everyone in the room could feel a palpable, yearning, profound sexual tension between them. In that moment I wanted nothing more than for someone to want me in the way this guy wanted that woman. What he did wasn’t acting. He just was.
Goethe’s most trusted colleague was a fellow named Friedrich Schiller, whom he admired so much that after Schiller's death in 1805, Goethe tracked down his skull and kept it on his desk for inspiration, or perhaps accountability. (Or, at any rate, what he believed was Schiler's skull; most Germans were buried in mass graves back then, and Goethe simply asked for the largest of the skulls in Schiller's cohort, because obviously Schiller had been the smartest of whatever lot he was interred with.) Schiller was a wonderful writer in his own right, of tumultuous Sturm und Drang plays and the lofty works of “Weimar Classicism” (basically, he and Goethe imitating the ancient Greeks and Romans). But one of his most famous writings is an essay called “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry.”
Schiller’s theory was that most poets are what he called “sentimental”—he didn’t use that word in the way we use it now, but rather to denote the clear act of labor present in most writing. Sentimental poets might be technically perfect, and even great—but they were always clearly trying, often really hard. Naïve poets, on the other hand—by which he meant his buddy Goethe—didn’t have to imitate nature, because they just were nature. They were possessed by beauty, by the creative Dämon, who took hold of them and guided their hands. Their work could be messy (although Goethe’s wasn’t); it could be rough, but it was, in Schiller’s conception, genius. Genius was hard to describe—although Schiller certainly did his best, and had a helpful exemplar in his friend—but you knew it when you were in its presence. And that October 2001 day in fake-Berlin, in real New York, with the smoldering World Trade Center leaking noxious smoke into every corner of Manhattan, there was genius on that stage.
“Great,” said Mark when the scene was finished, and I realized I’d been gripping the sides of my chair so tightly they made my knuckles white. “We’ll call you.”
The play had its second lead—and, more important, Rebecca Schuman was interested, despite the fact that he was three and a half years her junior and seemed to have a shaky relationship with shampoo.
During production, as I futzed with the genius’s props and gave him a crash course on the grisly and desolate occupation of Germany (itself the result of my own crash course at the New York Public Library), I teased some personal details out. He was from Connecticut, had gotten his first TV role as a high-school senior, then acquired an agent and a manager and skipped college to move straight to the city and book jobs.
“So is this what you do all the time?” he asked before tech rehearsal, as I rushed in with some dubious bodega vegetables so that Mark, the goddamned visionary auteur, could have real fucking food onstage during a meal scene.
“No,” I said. “I work as a Web editor at a nonprofit, down in, you know, the financial district.” I pointed in what I thought was the general direction of my day-job’s office on Broad Street, which was a twenty-minute walk away. “But now I’m just part-time there, because…”
“Got it.”
“I started out as an editorial assistant for a book publisher.”
“Cool,” he said. “I love to read.”
“Mostly I got coffee and made Xeroxes,” I said. “But every once in a while I got to do something interesting. Like, once my boss was trying to woo P. Diddy to write an autobiography, and I got to shuttle him up a freight elevator. He was called Puff Daddy then.”
The genius didn’t look as impressed as he should have.
“It was just him and me and his son and this giant bodyguard. He drives a completely silver Mercedes.”
“Is that what you want to do with your life?” he asked. “Like, edit? Or assist editors? Ferry P. Diddy up the elevator?”
“I guess,” I said. “At one point I think I wanted to be a writer. I write things for the Internet sometimes. I realize that doesn’t really count.”
“I’m always trying to write things, but I never get past the first paragraph. I have no discipline.”
“Oh!” I said. “Once this really intense dude from the Church of Scientology was mad about how he’d been portrayed in one of my boss’s books, and he showed up at the office and, like, wouldn’t leave.”
“Now that’s fucking cool,” he said. I smiled and cleared my throat as Mark blew in and glared at me for fraternizing with the talent.
The genius did love to read. He was currently midway through No Logo by Naomi Klein, and had as a result duct-taped over what few corporate logos remained on his threadbare clothes. (He was also in the process of watching every Kurosawa film ever made, in chronological order, and planned to move on to Sergio Leone next. Autodidacticism was, by the way, such a Schillerian-genius quality.) We exchanged books—he gave me Garth Ennis’s brilliant Preacher graphic novels, and I, at this point having looped all the way around to self-parody, brought him Kafka’s Complete Stories.
“I had a pretty tough time getting through the ‘Penal Colony’ one,” he confessed. Not because it was too violent, though. Because it was “kind of boring.”
“How can you say that? That story is gripping from the first word to the last.”
The first time we ever socialized away from backstage was the wrap party, where we ignored everyone else and afterward shared a cab to our respective homes—mine a studio near Lincoln Center whose four walls I could touch at once, his a one-bedroom on the East Side, whose rent was financed by his acting jobs: a Lifetime movie; a tiny role in an upcoming film where Harrison Ford was the Russian captain of a submarine and for authenticity spoke English in a thick Russian accent; an episode, need it even be said, of Law & Order. Everyone in the cast and crew of Berlin saw us get into a cab together and assumed certain things—but, in fact, what was happening was an actual, multifaceted, honest friendship.
All right, this was primarily because the genius hadn’t been interested in me romantically. Instead, he was trying to date the girl who’d played his sister in the Lifetime movie, but she had a boyfriend, and it was all very John Hughes (whose films I much preferred to Kurosawa’s). She was sleekly coiffed and lithe as a gazelle, and had been nominated for a Golden Globe; I was a stumpy-legged fake dramaturge with a haircut I gave myself. She was in magazines and on the side of buses; I read magazines and took the bus. I was perfectly aware that Molly Ringwald ends up with Blaine, and Duckie is forever doomed to staring sexlessly in the mirror at his own awesome hat. But you know what? I’m here to tell you that sometimes Duckie does get Molly Ringwald, even if Duckie is a thick-stemmed twenty-five-year-old female dramaturge and Molly Ringwald is a much better-looking male actor on television. For as it happened, one night, as we splayed on his futon (as friends), stuffed full of gummi frogs we’d procured from the bodega next door (as friends), after spending the earlier part of the evening smoking weak New York pot (as friends) through an apple bong (which we’d carved as friends), he grabbed my head and planted one right on me. “Say something German,” he said. “Anything.”
“Uh,” I said. “Warum? Was soll ich sagen? Ich weiß nicht, was du willst.”
“God, that’s so fucking sexy,” he said.
“Uh,” I continued, paragon of articulate bilingualism that I was, “I just told you I, like, didn’t know what you wanted.”
“Who the fuck cares?” he said. “It sounds hot. Say something else.”
Two weeks later, the lease on my miniature studio was up and my career as an unpaid dramaturge meant I lacked the means to afford its rent anymore. He suggested I move in, and we lived together for half of George W. Bush’s first term and a good portion of his second.
My new actor boyfriend took great pleasure in introducing me to his friends as “a German-speaking writer.” And, in the spirit of Kafka’s Trial and the endless hermeneutics of “Before the Law,” that was both true and false at the same time. I certainly spoke German better than, say, someone who doesn’t speak it at all, and I certainly put pen to paper on a regular basis (or, at any rate, finger to keyboard, enough to develop carpal tunnel syndrome), but in the years following my B.A., I didn’t get much published (except on the Internet, which barely counted), and my German weakened and then atrophied like the leg muscles of someone who’s been in traction for a year.
Sure, when I first moved to New York after graduation in 1998, I’d attempted to keep up my fluency in creative ways. At that editorial-assistant job, for example, I took it upon myself to compose a fax in German to Leni Riefenstahl. Not at random, mind you; she’d published a photo book with my boss, a notoriously mercurial editor with an impressive Rolodex. When he wasn’t directing me to type out correspondence to Johnny Rotten, however, he was yelling at me in a way even Germans had never prepared me for. He was so legendary for intemperance, in fact, that I started journaling my various indignities (sort of like how the philosopher G. E. Moore kept a diary specifically dedicated to the different ways in which Ludwig Wittgenstein hurt his feelings). Anyway, Leni Riefenstahl never faxed back, and until Berlin, I went about systematically forgetting my German as I purged my wardrobe of its jubilant Eurotrash brights.
The closest I came to interacting with the German canon was the tattoo I’d gotten at a dingy parlor by the Lorimer Street L train station in Williamsburg, after moving there in 1999 in a desperate flight from a terrible relationship with a manipulative dick I met two weeks after graduating from college, whose eighteen months of manipulative dickishness does not merit description. To celebrate my exit, I wanted an indelible marker. In the manner of Kafka’s very not-boring “Penal Colony,” I wanted the truth of it not simply to be understood with words. I wanted to feel it, as the Officer says to the Explorer in Kafka’s story, with my wounds. This desire culminated in the procurement of a single, two-inch-high tattoo on what seemed at the time the unusual and sensual location of my middle-lower back. It was so small that the visibly annoyed artist—who scoffed No when I asked if he wanted to know the significance behind the design, which I created myself by Xeroxing a page out of The Castle at 1,000 percent—could only charge the shop minimum of fifty dollars. It took three-quarters of an episode of The Simpsons to complete, and hurt slightly more than an aggressive teeth cleaning. It consisted only of a single letter and a single piece of punctuation, made to look as if it had been stamped on with a dirty typewriter key: K. It would be the closest I’d come to thinking seriously about German literature until several years (and a much better boyfriend) later.
Never once did I think about keeping up with my German—language, literature, anything—in graduate school, because graduate school had never been part of my plan—well, real graduate school. As another measure of post-relationship-with-the-dickish-guy independence, and primarily because he had “forbidden” me to do something so stupid, I laid out many thousands of borrowed dollars to get an M.F.A. in fiction writing, occupying two evenings a week for two years feeling deeply misunderstood as a group of my peers indulgently discussed my thinly veiled autobiography. Then, after Berlin wrapped and I was shacking up with the kind, generous, and blessedly not emotionally abusive actor, I’d even parlayed that M.F.A. into a quick and depressing semester teaching Business Communications (a.k.a. remedial composition) at an unaccredited secretarial school in New Jersey. But four months spent grading on the PATH train and collapsing every night at nine thirty was enough of a detour into the hallowed halls of academe for me. My parents, two disgruntled English Ph.D.s, certainly agreed.
“Just get famous doing something and get an honorary doctorate,” scoffed Sharon Schuman when I told her I’d absconded from the secretarial school. “It worked for Dan Quayle.”
