We enjoyed our au natural breakfast at the small dark alley cafe, owned and operated by a former Luftwaffe officer. He opened up after the war and named it the Luftwaffle House that not only served Blitzkrieg Blintz and a stack of monster Panzer pancakes, but featured an annual Hermann Goering look-a-like contest that attracted every weirdo from Bavaria to Berlin.
We returned to our apartment and got dressed, nudity at that time of the morning in that alley and at that cafe were perfectly acceptable. Even the cooks looked at us with a smirk...we only frequented early morning and late night "Nude" establishments. Now dressed we went out to the hardware store and bought a ton of nails and a huge sheet of plywood to cover the opening where a window once stood. They don't find nudity humorous as we did.
After a few hours of cleaning up the gallery wreckage we called the rest of the artists and our friends to fill them in on what happened and to seek their help in in the great gallery mop up operation so we could continue the Frida event as planned. Fuck those Nazi’s...the show must go on...now more than ever!
They all agreed and arrived to do away with the debris and trash, sweep and mop, empty trash and get the place back into shape...leaving the Frida and other posters as they were. Shot full of shrapnel. We wanted to show resilience and determination in lieu of the attack. We would just call it "performance art" by the right wing or "The Hell Heil of Hitler" while the gallery event was to now be "Hot To Trotsky - Phase Two!"
Then at night a meeting and wine & dope party discussion of the gallery’s future. The politics of Berlin best discussed over smoked and injected drugs.
They all left around 3 PM when we were done with the clean up, we’d already talked to the cops earlier and now time to hit the store down the street run by a blind Chinese man who inhaled paint fumes on a daily basis. We needed to stock up on a supply of beer and wine for the evening.
Sibyll an I were already sans clothing by the time they started arriving at 8 PM. They too removed every article of clothing as they entered. We always felt complete nudity led to complete honesty as you weren’t hiding behind a pair of Levis or a bra. Besides it was relaxing and a room full of 20 naked artists and anarchists was performance art of another order. Erections and large nipples speak louder than words, while the musk in the air emitted by all was better than incense at a Buddhist retreat.
One by one they stumbled in. First Pietro and his newly acquired girlfriend from the Soho District in London who claimed to be a different work of art every time she met you. “Tonight I am Venus De Milo,” she said with the conviction of an escaped mental patient, to which I replied, “Of course, I didn’t recognize you at first with arms.”She swore she would remove them later. This I had to see.
In fact, later I said we could remove all 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 thier 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 quick romp under the covers!”
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…
