I have the look of a hobo just up from the tracks; I always have had. Not even a Brooks Brothers suit and a shave can hide it. I have been balding for as long as I can remember, I have a subtly bad complexion and my posture is not good. All but the most expensively tailored clothing fit me poorly.
Felix, on the other hand, is tall, has an engaging, utterly sincere smile, thick dark brown curly hair, blue eyes and straight teeth the color of white eggshell.
So it was only natural that the girls and women who stopped to listen to us gravitated to Felix and, without realizing it, made me feel invisible. Usually at the end of a day of busking there were one or two who had stayed on, perhaps initially captivated by the music, but in the end infatuated by a smile and a wink from Felix and the idea that getting close to a good looking talented musician might be something magical. Felix could pick and choose, and so he did. Of course there were sometimes runners up, friends of the infatuated winners who occasionally consented to tag along and be paired up with me. But tag along is all they ever did, and none of them was actress enough or good-natured enough to effectively mask their disappointment.
I am not a braggart; I am a better than average guitarist and one of the best street musicians you'll ever hear. Most acoustic street guitarists can't do anything more subtle than a loud strum. My playing, however, a combination of finger picking and flamenco strumming, makes the guitar sound rich, loud and full, even at the edge of a bustling street. My harmony singing is usually on key, if not powerful. Felix sings like a bird. We compliment each other beautifully.
West Berlin in the Nineties was the perfect place for busking; plenty of subway stations and crowded pedestrian malls. Plenty of twenty- to fifty-year-olds with pockets full of throwaway marks. Plenty of people who knew that their economy, their cars and their beer are the best in the world but that their homegrown pop music is two or three steps below Third World. (The most popular music in Germany is sung and written in English; our music sells millions in their country; can you name even one German pop music group?)
So an American duo, singing `60's American and English classic rock and folk music, who aren't quite good enough to get a paying gig in the States, can easily make decent money playing the streets of Berlin, or Hamburg, or Stuttgart, or any number of German cities. Of course it helped immensely to have the right look, and we had the right look by half.
It must have been a school holiday, because the teenage girls were out in force, swarming the plaza where we'd set up. We'd opened with "Me and Julio Down by the School Yard" and "Back in the USSR," up-tempo songs that attract a throng, and were just into the second verse of "Peace Train" when I noticed a guy in amongst the onlookers. A man, mid-forties or so, who, with his plastic "leather look" jacket and paisley ascot stood out against the mostly young, mostly female crowd, like a gnarly stem supporting a beautiful flower.
He was staring at me, not in the way that the occasional guitar player wannabe stared, at the fingers only-he was looking directly, unblinkingly, into my eyes. When he realized that he'd caught my attention he smiled briefly, clandestinely, and gave me a conspiratorial wave with the index and middle finger of his right hand. I struggled to remember if I'd seen him somewhere before.
Coins and some folding money were accumulating in the guitar case that lay at our feet. Between songs, the guy with the ascot came up to me and pulled out a fiver. Instead of putting it into the case with the rest of the money, however, he folded the bill carefully in half, reached over and stuffed it into the breast pocket of my shirt.
"That's for you; not to share with him," he said, nodding his head at Felix. It was then that I thought remembered seeing him the day before listening to us at the Tiergarten, and thought, or at least imagined, that maybe I'd seen him prior to that when we played at the subway stop near the depot.
Felix had noticed the exchange and gave me an exaggerated thumbs up, like I had just made a big score. I took the bill out of my pocket and tossed it into the case. "We share all our profits," I said to the guy.
"But there are some things that one should not share," he said to me.
Too weird, I thought as we played "Bad Moon Rising."
I purposely quit looking at the guy, but he wouldn't leave. Twice more he approached me with neatly folded up five mark notes; both times I turned away so that he couldn't stuff the bills into my shirt pocket.
Felix was taking all this in and I knew what was going through his mind. For the past couple of weeks we'd been having the same discussion every night about how we should be saving our money to get tickets back to the States. We'd been in Germany for four months, and in other Central European locations for four months before that. The money we made playing music in the streets was generally enough to get by on day to day. But busking is thirsty work, and we routinely managed to eat and drink up the day's profits each night in the jolly little stubes and beer halls that seemed to be on every corner of every city we "worked." There was never more than a few pfennigs left over, and so we'd managed to save nothing. I knew from the look in Felix's eyes and the way he kept glancing over at that unlikely face in the crowd that he was contemplating a way to get something to deposit into our saving plan.
Between "Born in the USA" and "Day Tripper" Felix drew me aside and told me to smile at the guy and let him stuff away. "Cash into your pocket, I mean," he added, laughing. "You have got to meet this guy; I think he really likes...your playing. And he's kind of cute." I told Felix to piss off.
We had been staying with Anna, a girl Felix had met the day we arrived in Berlin. A girl with an innocent face and short brown hair who smelled of fresh air and laundry detergent. I was sleeping on the couch in the living room of her small flat while she and Felix shared the bedroom.
Anna was experiencing life with a musician for the first time and it seemed that after a few weeks she already could tell that it was not going to be all fun and romantic. It was the music that got people to check us out; but it was Felix who got the people, mostly women, to deposit money. A lot of the women who donated their bits of loose change and bills expected something in return. For some, a smile was payment enough. But for others, who'd invested a bit a more money and time than is usually given to street musicians, conversation and sometimes a hug were expected. Felix lived life to the fullest and he never denied it, to me, to Anna, to anyone. Anna had tolerated the hugs and attention that Felix had doled out to his admirers, but it had pained her. Now, though, after being monogamous with Anna for about three weeks, I could sense that Felix was restless. It was in his nature.
"I think," said Felix between songs, "that you should invite your new friend back to Anna's so that we can get to know him a little better and see what he's all about."
"Well," I said, "you can invite him, but I'm not going to be there when he arrives."
"But he doesn't like me," Felix replied. "Really, I think it'd be a good idea, he's got money and he seems harmless enough."
"For God's sake," I said, "the man is wearing a plastic jacket; how rich can he be? And besides, he's going to want some kind of return on his money; what do you suppose that might be?"
"Just think about it," said Felix. "You don't have to give him anything. Just be nice to him."
Felix insisted we play "Let's Spend the Night Together."
*
The next morning Felix showed up at Anna's flat at about ten o'clock and he and I went out to get some coffee for the three of us. He had not spent the night at Anna's and I had heard her weeping as I tried to sleep on the couch. When we got back to Anna's with the coffee, our backpacks and a bunch of loose clothes and other belongings were sitting on the lawn in front of her apartment.
I pounded on the door and yelled for Anna to give me my guitar.
The guitar was a 1983 Martin D35 which I'd gotten as an even trade for my 1970 Stratocaster when Felix had convinced me of the wonders of being on the road in Europe doing the acoustic thing and fighting off the girls. It was a serviceable, crisp sounding guitar with a big wide fret board and fast action. I was fond of it. But as I contemplated its being lost, all I could think of was the Strat, which my mother, after endless begging, had bought me at Christmas when I was twelve and which I had loved and cherished and had almost cried over when I traded it away.
After a while Anna put her head out of a window and said that my guitar was out there with the rest of our stuff. I told her to come out and show me exactly where she'd put it, although I knew already with a sinking certainty that it was gone.
In a minute Anna came out and looked around and confirmed that the guitar was not where she'd left it. She started crying and apologizing and told me I could come in and call the police. This, unfortunately, was out of the question. We'd been in the Germany for too long and had already been told by the Berlin cops twice to get out due to the fact that we were way beyond the limits of our visas. Our most recent discussion with the police had included some veiled threats about detention and fines the next time they caught us working the streets.
While we were gathering up our belongings, a battered blue gray Citroen 2CV "duck," decorated with swastikas and iron cross decals and driven by a skinhead, roared up and stopped across the street. The driver and his two bald passengers stared at us for a moment and then peeled away. "I think I know who's got my guitar," I said. "Looks like they came back to lick up the remains and had to leave empty handed."
Felix thought that the whole situation was comical, until I explained to him that not only did we not have any money or any place to stay, we now had no way to earn money.
"That's true, but we do have this," he said, handing me a business card.
The card had the name DETRICH ZUNGABE, on it and at the bottom there was a telephone number and an address. "Who the hell is Detrich Zungabe?" I said.
"It's your buddy from yesterday, the guy with the never ending supply of cash. I think we need to pay him a visit and find out how much he really likes you. This card just happened to be in one of those folded up fivers he tried to put in your pocket. Let's find a phone."
I told him to cram it and went back and knocked on Anna's door. She told me that I could come in, but that Felix was a piece of shit who could piss off.
My first reaction was the same one that I would have had if my guitar had been stolen back home in Chicago: check all the nearby pawn shops and music stores. I ripped the couple of pages out of Anna's phone book that had the addresses of local shops, and Felix and I gathered our belongings and started walking.
By the time the shops began to close for the night we'd covered what felt like a lot of miles on foot, lugging along our knapsacks. We were beat and I was angry and worried.
The guitar had not surfaced and I was starting to wonder what the Germans really did to foreigners who had no money and no visible means of support. We had the equivalent of about three dollars between us and nowhere to sleep. Felix had made a few attempts to meet women along the way, but had been unsuccessful. Without the music and with his grubby pack and hungry look he'd lost his appeal.
"Wow," he said in mock surprise, just as it started to drizzle, "do you know where we happen to be? We just happen to be about four blocks away from Mr. Detrich Zungabe's house. And that, my friend, is exactly where we're going right this very second." Without waiting for me to disagree, Felix started walking off at a brisk pace.
The address was a five story walk-up overlooking the river Spree. Felix never hesitated, but located the name on the mailbox at the front door and went directly in and up the narrow stairs, with me trailing along behind.
The door to apartment 10 was opened by a striking woman with luxuriously long blond hair who was wearing an evening dress that accentuated her substantial bosom. I began thinking that perhaps I had misjudged Detrich, and that if he had women like this hanging around him maybe he was worth knowing after all. Felix, however, looked at her and, again, without hesitating, said, "How's it going, Detrich?"
Detrich seemed to look right through Felix as he invited us in. He shook hands with both of us and tried to give me a little hug. It didn't seem to bother him that that we'd caught him in a wig and dress. "What brings you to my house?" he asked. Felix told him that we'd had a setback and now needed a place to stay for the night and perhaps to borrow some money so that we could get me a new guitar.
Detrich stepped back and motioned us in. It was like entering a cave. The walls were painted dark gray and the woodwork at the doors, windows and baseboard was black. Tiny lights illuminated a collection of artwork along the walls of a lengthy corridor-a combination of dime store kitsch and ultra-modern painting and sculpture, all assembled, it appeared, more for dramatic than aesthetic effect. Brian Eno's "Music for Airports" was playing softly on a stereo. The corridor opened up into a small living room. An aquarium full of doll's heads sat on an end table, and there were masks hanging all over the walls along with framed black and white photos of male movie stars. The photos had been touched up with watercolors to appear that the men were heavily made up. It was stuff that might have been interesting to look at against the stark walls of a museum. In the moody light of the apartment, however, it was unsettling.
Detrich made a big process out of getting up a tray of drinks, schnapps with a beer chaser, and then he sat down and insisted on hearing the entire story. I was in no mood to talk and so Felix told him what had happened and then got right to the point and asked Detrich how much he could lend us.
"Boys," Detrich said, "I have almost no money ... but I maybe can help you just a little bit. It's common knowledge, you see, everyone knows that car and those awful boys. I know where this group stays. I can show you the place where you will most likely find your guitar waiting to be pawned for a few marks first thing tomorrow morning. I can show you where it is, but I can tell you that you'll never get in their door; at least, not looking the way you look."
*
Detrich was thoroughly enjoying the process of lathering my head and brandishing an antique straight razor like an old time barber ... or a butcher, I thought nervously, as I sat wondering how this scenario from a nightmarish Halloween could possibly be happening. He had taken off the wig and very immodestly removed the foam pads that he used for falsies and now looked quite ghoulish due to all the red, white and blue makeup that he still had on. As he began to scrape away at the hair on my pate I kept wondering when he was going to snap and slash my throat. Not surprisingly, Felix had declined to shave his head and join me in Detrich's proposed guitar rescue operation.
"Now for a few tattoos," Detrich said with great satisfaction as he wiped away the last of the lather from my naked dome, "let's start with a swastika." He got out a delicate old fountain pen, filled it with the right shade of muddy blue black ink and started in.
About 45 minutes later I was pronounced ready. I had the swastika neatly inked on the top of my head and an iron cross earring dangling from my left lobe. Detrich had distressed my jeans and shirt but noted, somewhat scornfully, that my leather jacket was just right without alterations.
"Now keep in mind," he said, "that you detest all foreigners." I told him that that might seem a bit disingenuous seeing that I too was a foreigner here in Germany.
"No, no," he said, "they'll understand that you mean colored foreigners; they are the only real foreigners."
I had it in my mind to ask him how I, in my new persona, should feel about homosexuals, but I let it pass. He was, after all, going way out of his way to help us.
*
The building, probably an abandoned warehouse, appeared to be the closest thing Berlin had to a Chicago style tenement. It stood on a vacated block looking as though it had gone off to be alone before it died. Obviously the wrecking ball could not be far behind. The Citroen was parked in front.
From the outside of the place, a three story brick building, I could see a flickering light through the glassless window sashes.
"Speak with a southern drawl," Detrich whispered. "The accent doesn't have to be terribly accurate, because these are idiot German racists who will be easily convinced. American racists, just like American musicians, are the best in the world; if you're convincing you'll be their hero. Tell them you're from Georgia, here on official Aryan Nation business and you need a place to spend the night, Heil Hitler. Oh, and most importantly, remember the attitude...you're confident, you're tough, you're unstoppable and you're full of love and hate." He gave my shoulders a squeeze and gently pushed me out of the shadow of the tree in which we stood about two blocks away from the building. All I could think of as I walked towards the place was that I wanted my guitar.
Entering the building, I discovered that security was not an issue. There was no one to stop and question me at the unlocked front door and, though it was too dark to tell for sure, it appeared that there was no one at all on the first floor of the place. My hand brushed against a light switch, which I assumed would not work, but which I chose not to flick. It was dark enough so that my eyes took time to adjust. My nose, on the other hand, was immediately assaulted by the pissy, beery stench of the carpeting. What floated into vision as my eyes finally adjusted were bashed-in plaster walls smeared with the requisite slogans: "White is Right," "Fourth Reich is Coming" and "Foreigners out!"
The light that we had seen from the street had come from the second story of the building, and so I searched until I found a stairway at the far end of the dismal corridor.
My boots made an enormous echoing, clomping noise as I mounted the wooden steps. An alarm? No, I told myself, just another tough guy racist returning to H.Q. Soft, timid steps would have been a dead give away. With that thought in mind, I clomped even harder, purposefully, resolutely. The room at the top of the stairs was massive and stark; perhaps it had been a storage facility...or, possibly it had once teamed with workers at benches, all sweating profusely amidst the noise and confusion. Now the room was bare except for a few dull shapes that my somewhat restored vision decided were mattresses positioned randomly here and there. Though I couldn't see it well enough to confirm, I felt certain that the floor was maple or birch planks with fifty years of dust ground into the grain and into the ever widening spaces between the boards so that at last it seemed to be a well-packed dirt floor. As I clomped in, not one of the small group huddled around a barrel fire in the center of the room gave me more than a cursory glance. It was then that I realized that this was not a tightly-knit militia organization, but rather simply a ragtag group of like-minded zealots who probably couldn't even tell one from another. I could see that they were passing around a gallon jug. When I was within fifteen paces of the fire barrel I caught sight of my guitar lying face down in a corner of the room. For a moment I mentally dissected the idea of calmly walking over, picking it up and walking away with it. But just at that moment one of them, a guy with two front teeth out yelled something at me in German which I could not translate. "Heil Hitler," I yelled back, and then, uncertain of what to do next, I started babbling: "Do any of you ol' boys know Helmut Schnaker? See, I'm over here from the state of Alabama, over there in America, and I'm supposed to deliver a big ol' batch of literature that was printed up by my brothers in the Aryan Nation group, Heil Hitler, who want you to have and distribute this literature so that the word of the white man can be disseminated amongst the peoples of this once great nation that is now spiraling ever downward due to the influx fiendish foreigners of dark persuasion. Any a' you-all fellers speak English? The home office in Georgia wants to know how y'all are coming along with the battle. I just need to know if this is the right place for me to have the pamphlets and such delivered, and I'm also wondering if I could get a swig of that wine and maybe a place to rest up for a mite."
The same guy who had yelled at me sneered and said to the one standing closest to him: "Go and find Buzz; I think he would be quite interested to know that he is not, after all, the only American skinhead living in Berlin at this moment. That is, if this guy really is a skinhead."
*
Five months earlier I'd been at an open air flea market in Amsterdam when I noticed in amongst the mounds of rags, greasy tools, pornographic magazines, dishes and general trash, a perfect leather jacket. Perfect in that the shine was almost completely worn off the leather on the outside, but the inner fleece lining was nicely intact and luxuriously deep. Perfect in that there was a thought-provoking bullet hole (or so I presumed,) in the chest of the thing. Perfect in that, unlike many of the other leather jackets on display, this one had no gang insignia or pithy saying crudely scrawled across the back in red or white paint. And perfect in that it fit me.
Though I was perilously close to broke, I paid $20 for the jacket. After wearing it for a couple of weeks, I discovered an added bonus-underneath a loose flap deep in the lining just below the right armpit was a two inch zipper which opened a hidden pocket. Inside this secret cavity was a tightly folded up twenty dollar bill and wedged into the corner of the pocket, above the twenty were two cherry bombs. Since discovering this catch I'd spent plenty of daydream time imagining various scenarios about the bad-boy American who'd been traveling abroad on a BMW with fireworks and 20 dollars in mad money stashed in his jacket when he'd been shot through the heart in Morocco during a drug deal that went wrong. After being killed, his jacket, his bike and his boots had been traded far and wide and often. Finally the jacket had come to rest in Amsterdam awaiting the former owner's spiritually appointed successor. It was obvious that I was meant to be that successor. After all, I'd paid for the jacket with $20 that I could not really afford and then had been fully reimbursed shortly thereafter. The twenty had been changed and spent, but I hadn't told Felix about the cherry bombs because I knew he'd insist on firing them off immediately, no matter the location or the time of day or night. I had been saving them for a special occasion.
I figured that meeting Buzz was not going to be a positive experience. Buzz was obviously a person of determination with enough smarts to make his way to Germany. My phony drawl might have gotten past the idiot Germans, but I had no illusions that my poorly disguised Chicagoese would slip past an American; even an idiot American.
"You guys know Buzz?" I said, "That's great...I can't wait to see him."
Walking purposefully toward my guitar I reached into my inner pocket pretending to search for a cigarette and asked if any of the group had a smoke. One of them motioned to a pack that lay on the floor. I picked it up and lit one. By the time I had walked over to the guitar, I had the two cherry bombs in my hand.
I picked up the Martin. "What the fuck are you doing with our guitar?" one of them snarled at me as I started walking.
"Just going to look at it," I replied, forgetting all about the drawl. With the guitar in my hand I strode to within a few feet of the fire barrel. Then, with all the subtlety of a bad actor in a melodrama, I suddenly pointed to a corner of the room and yelled: "What's that?"
In the split second that the others looked away I tossed one of the cherry bombs into the barrel, turned and started making for the stairs. I had no idea how old the cherry bomb was, or how wet it had been or if the thing would blow or not. The others were up and after me when the explosion resounded. And it stunned them enough so that I had a sizable jump on them by the time I made it to the top of the stairs.
As I started down I could hear them arguing about whether or not I had a gun. They did not appear to be following me and I knew that it was going to be all right. Going down the stairs I held the Martin lovingly in my arms and ran my hands over the body feeling for deep scratches or dents and swearing to myself that somehow I'd save enough to replace the hardshell case that was probably still up there in the dark along with our set lists and scraps of paper upon which I'd scratched out bits of original songs.
I was three fourths of the way down the stairs and had just started feeling the light-headed jubilation that follows an ordeal successfully completed, when the stairwell was suddenly flooded with light, intense, blinding white light. Two more skinheads stood at the bottom of the stairs staring up at me. They were both bald and dressed alike in black pants and leather jackets, but despite these similarities, one of them was, without a doubt, a beef-fed, gun-loving, good ol' boy American redneck town bully if I'd ever seen one. The confederate flag stitched onto the breast of his jacket confirmed it. "That's him, Buzz," the other one said, "says he's an American. What's he doing with our guitar, Buzz?"
"The fuck do I know," said Buzz, as he started up towards me. At that moment the group from above, who had mustered up their collective courage, assembled at the top of the stairs. "Get the sucker, Buzz," one of them yelled down, "he's got our guitar."
"Buzz," I yelled, with as much drawl as I could manage, "is that you?" His face folded up into a quizzical look as he tried to place me. "Its me, Johnny."
He took a couple of tentative steps up the stairs to get a closer look at me. It was at that moment that I felt a drop of sweat trickle down my forehead. It hung on my brow for a second and then, pushed on by the next drop in line, it fell. I wiped my hand across my brow and saw that my fingers were wet. And blue.
Buzz came up the stairs to where I stood. He was a foot taller than I, and as he stared down at me with a look of disdain, he said: "Johnny, your fake tattoo's running all over your face. And since I don't know you from Adam, I'm going to have to give you a good old German style ass-kicking until we find out just exactly who you are and what you're doing here rippin' off our guitar."
There were six steps between me and the bottom of the stairs. I sucked hard on the cigarette and brought the second cherry bomb up to the tip and lit it and leapt to the bottom of the steps. I managed to get my hand on the light switch and toss the cherry bomb onto stairs at the same time. It was pitch dark except for the sparkle of heat that flashed through the fuse. The flash flared nova-like for a moment and then died. "It's out," one of them yelled. I was through the door and could hear them falling all over themselves to get to the bottom of the stairs. And it was then that the last smoldering spark must have found enough dry powder to make the final leg of the journey through the fuse and into the motherload.
The cherry bomb must have blown with Buzz standing on it, or sitting on it, or something, because his curses could be clearly heard from my location thirty yards away where I was running for all I could.
Looking over my shoulder I saw the skinheads spill out of the building and get into the car. In my mind I could see dozens of them piling in like clowns at the circus and then jumping out as they caught up with me, pounding me with lead pipes and stomping on me with their hobnail boots.
All I heard, however, was the coughing grating sound of the 2CV as it tried and tried to catch and start. Then, like a dying man clearing his throat for the last time, it petered out.
Later Detrich told me that after I'd entered the building, he had sneaked up, opened the car's hood and pulled a couple of wires out of the distributor cap; not all of the wires, but just enough so that the skinheads would continue to hope for a while that the thing would start while I got a decent jump. I decided, when I heard that, that Detrich was going to be a friend for life.
No one followed me the rest of the way back to Detrich's apartment; I know because I did about half of the trip looking over my shoulder. Detrich and Felix were surprised to see me. The plan had been for the two of them to wait around to make sure I got into the building all right and then head back to Detrich's. I was to make myself at home with the skinheads, wait until they were all asleep and then sneak out with the guitar at four in the morning at which time Detrich and Felix were to be waiting outside the building to help if help were needed.
Before I told them the story of my encounter with Buzz I called for schnapps and plenty of it. What I got was some high-proof, bitter tasting cherry brandy. What ever it was, it burned sufficiently enough to let me know that I would be relaxing soon.
As I related what had happened, Detrich kept the drinks coming at a furious pace, and when the brandy ran out he got a bottle of some kind of expensive Irish whiskey. At that point I didn't care what it was, as long as it could be used to drink away the adrenalin that was still pumping furiously through my veins.
And then suddenly I started feeling like a drunken bear at the end of a long autumn, dead tired, disoriented and ready to hibernate.
Detrich had a small guest room where he insisted I sleep while Felix got the couch in the living room.
*
I was back in the States, onstage at First Avenue, in Minneapolis, the same place where Prince had cut his teeth a few years earlier. It felt so incredibly good to be playing the Stratocaster again, fronting a three piece power rock group and dazzling the audience with licks that would make Jimi Hendrix lay down his ax and vow never to touch it again. God, I was singing too, with this incredible Jack Bruce waver in my throat. Those in the audience who weren't dancing frenetically were staring transfixed at my hands as I raced them up and down the neck hitting notes faster than John McLaughlin could even think them. Only one problem. ... no, make that two problems ... the damn Stratocaster was pink ... no one plays a pink Strat; I doubt they even make a pink Strat. On top of that, the guitar neck had a kind of a rubbery feel to it, there was a give to it like it was hard rubber or something. So what, I thought, the crowd was yelling its ass off ... Suddenly the yelling was too freaking loud. I closed my eyes hard and then opened them. And there was Detrich leaning over the bed. I looked at my fretting hand and it took me a moment to realize that I was firmly holding his erect penis. I wanted desperately for this too to be part of the dream, but it wouldn't go away. Detrich yelled again, near ecstacy.
With a shudder I leapt up, pushing him into a heap in the corner. After vomiting on the bed and the floor I screamed at Detrich to get out of my sight or I'd break his head off. He tried to say something, but before he could get more than a couple of words out I picked up an ashtray and threw it at him. The ashtray caught him in the thigh as he went into the bathroom and locked the door.
I woke Felix up and told him to get his stuff and get ready to go immediately, and not to ask any questions, ever, or I'd break his head off. As I was getting dressed I found Detrich's wallet sitting on the top of his desk. There was a big wad of money in it, all of which I stuffed into my pocket. As we were going out the door I showed it to Felix. "Looks like big D was holding out on us," he said, "and I guess I know why." At the top of the stairs Felix told me to wait a second and then turned and ran back into the apartment. A minute later he caught up to me out in front of the building. He was carrying a plastic shopping bag.
Later I woke up on a train, but I didn't care enough to wake Felix and ask him what our destination was. I did have a vague memory of walking to the train station and telling Felix to use every last pfennig of the money I taken from Detrich to get us tickets to as far away as possible. A couple of hours later, when we rolled into Munich, Felix announced that we were home.
We took turns doing the fake hotel guest scam...walking into a fancy hotel where we could wash up in a comfortable, well appointed lobby restroom. But despite being somewhat clean, I felt about as fresh as mold. My mouth was dry and my head throbbed. None of this mattered a bit to Felix, who was quite hungry, and intent on finding a place thick with people so that we could get to work as soon as possible.
I told him to stuff it, that my cue ball looks and intensely shitty frame of mind were guaranteed to kill off whatever might be left of our charisma. We didn't even have the money to buy me a hat. I told him that we'd be better off finding a bank to rob than trying to bilk pedestrians out of their hard earned money.
That's when Felix opened the plastic bag, the one he'd taken with him from Detrich's apartment, the one that changed my life. First he pulled out a scissors, and then, one at a time, he pulled out four wigs, the long blond one that Detrich had been wearing the night before, a curly redhead, a brunette and a jet black.
My initial reaction was that I didn't want to touch anything that Detrich had had any contact with. But Felix kept insisting and telling me how fabulous I was going to look. Finally I took the blond one and stretched it over my head. Felix took the scissors and hacked the front off into straight bangs hanging just over my eyebrows. Then he sort of layered the top and the back into a ragged shoulder length look. "Kind of a Brian Jones thing," he told me.
Less than an hour later I was shaking my head with more zip than Ringo Starr had at the height of Beatlemania and snapping my neck over to the side to clear my bangs out of my eyes as we tore through "Money For Nothing". A girl in the audience smiled at me, and it wasn't a smirky "look at that poor schmuck with the bad rug" smile. It was something else.
There was already lots of money in the box that we'd put out front. I smiled back at the girl and started playing the bouncy octave riff at the beginning to "I Feel Fine."
© 2006 by John C. Wright.