Luckily the u-bahn was super late (due to an interruption which turned out to be morbid). If there’s one thing I hate more than a drunkard puking on the platform, it's a drunkard puking inside the train. I'm grateful to have been the lesser evil. Anastas offered tissues and held my back.
His flat was tidy, the shelves did not stack stock exchange or Get Things Done books. Still, a disconcerting number of female anime figurines with guns or lances which I pretended not to have seen, easy in my hazy state. He rushed to deploy the sofa-bed and brought bedsheets and pillows. I was touched and hoped it was just for shows. Retrospectively I'm glad it wasn't.
Restless me made him show around the house, his bedroom (more figurines! alas), lest I'll sleep alone. At an attempt to recuperate my dignity I tried my best at getting sexy like asking him to help me unclasp my bra, then changed unabashed to a T-shirt of his but he pretended to see nothing. Maybe really he preferred small plastic persons. While he brushed his teeth I slumped in the middle of his bed. It felt encroaching but the bed was so comfortable it was too late.
He was up when I woke up, and judging by the disarray he had slept on the sofa-bed. We shared tea and ginger cookies on the little balcony (I was jelly). He invited me to come watch a Fridge Poetry competition later at noon, told me to help myself to the kitchen and disappeared behind closed doors to record a video.
I considered cutting home but being a little hung over I was content sitting on his balcony and watch into other people's flats just a few moments longer, until he reemerged from his session. On the way to the competition I told him that he should up his game since TikTok was not serious. ‘Like what?’ he asked. ‘YouTube‘ I said. He said he would only if I helped him. I told him I didn't have an influencer kind of face and he said I had the ‘right energy.’
I didn't believe that competition was really a thing we were going to. I stopped us several times, once before and once after the tube, to enter a Späti (that's the Berlin equivalent of the corner store) for beers and commenced acting like a prat on the street.
When he finally managed to drag me there, we had missed the opening and arrived in the midst of the Mini Fridge Renga ‘finals’. I was so astounded that I immediately asked him if he and Jim Morrison had managed to wrangle any royalties but a lady hushed me. Renga is basically an exquisite corpse where each competitor, at the sound of a gong, moved one fridge over and added a haiku to the existing chain. Ceiling-mounted vertical screens displayed a close up of the emerging poetry, which the attendees watched speechless like brokers during a stock exchange crash. I looked forward to be initiated into a cult but it was nothing THAT exciting. At least the attendants were quirky and between intermissions I discreetly scrolled through my phone.
On the way out I bought some merch. I explained Anastas that if I took them back to my fridge the words would be eaten alive by the beasts infesting my flat. A Sylvia Plath fan flower girl supported my cause. Anastas raised his hands.
I covered his fridge with magnets. He corrected my articles and shifted the verbs to their rightful place. I claimed poetic license to little avail. I would write him to ask how my poems were doing and they served an excuse to hop over. After the second time I slept over (sofa-bed this time) we were ensconced in the friend zone. I suspected he was seeing somebody (turned to be true) but we hanged out a lot at his place.
Though I initially had second thoughts about being part of it, it was I who championed our collaborative YouTube idea against his many maybes (Anastas for ‘no’). Once he spent his vetoes on ‘morning routine’ videos performed on his face and on an ‘authentic cooking’ show (I loved cooking) he had to accept doing a vlog about a couple of strangers meeting at a bar for a date, starring us.
We met at Das Botellodrom, winged the entire thing. I developed into a suicidal poet (ok, was not so funny) and he into a crypto investor. He drank three times as much as me and got enraged when the bartender did not accept dogecoin as legal tender. We would have been kicked out if we were not leaving. The date did not go well by any means but not wanting to let it end I asked, ‘zu mir oder zu dir?’ (local for ‘let's get sexy together?’)
‘Zu dir,’ he answered. (Yes!)
The video itself had no redeeming qualities. I had kept the camera rolling as we after all went to his place and pretended it was mine (though I was supposed to have twenty cats. ‘They're afraid of dogecoins.’ Yes, facepalm). Under the guises we got touchier than ever before (It remained PG 13, don't get too excited). Again I slept on the sofa-bed and the next day we agreed we had fun doing it.
We did a few more, with more invested characters:
I an exiled princess from a kingdom bloodily turned republic, he Luis Kyburg, the murderous Argentinian navy officer, meeting at Hoptimismus, a short lived candy-coloured bar-café in Pberg.
I Michelle Pfeiffer (as the alter ego of Catwoman), he a retired Pope, meeting at Miko's, a tiny bar (no tables) renowned for its eponymous bartender, full of confabulated tales about ventures to outer space.
I an anterograde amnesiac, he an affectatious guitarist who didn't stop about his two guitars, García and Lucía, and how one flowed mellifluously against brass instrumentation while the other went well with piano, fish dishes and wine, while insisting he couldn't tell his two golden retrievers apart. We met at Konstantinoupolis, a taverna with an amazing eggplant dip.
I a cross-dressing musketeer, he Cardinal Richelieu the grey eminence (his Pope cloak was expensive and inside-out-able, it had to be reused) meeting at Lorelei, your typical Berlin kneipe or dive-bar with a woody interior, warm lights, a couple of touchscreen slot-machines and a pool table inside the smokers' aquarium.
I a late stage capitalism corporate queen bee on a recruiting tour, he Senada the Bavarian composer, hiding his allergy to sexual arousal (it's thing!), meeting at Walhalla. Turned out it was not a mead hall for right wing metalheads but a clean restaurant with polite and precise waiters. We were very disappointed.
That last one went big and his formerly tolerant girlfriend got very upset (that's why actors only date actors, they understand it's ACTING) and he said we better stopped.
We continued, forming the channel ‘Dwarf and the Seven Snowwhites’ with its enduring format, where my character was the protagonist, looking for THE ONE, and his the monster match of the week. These were bar and café reviews made off-handedly behind an ostensible foreground of episodic modern encounters of the lovelorn. Even though we ditched ironically naming it ‘Snowwhite and the Seven Dwarves’ for searchability reasons, a kind commentator provided unsolicited grooming tips to the dear Snow White (I was the darf, stupid) who was a ‘swarthy chick with a moustache.’ Thank you, internet.
We made 62 feature twenty minute videos (not including the last, never edited footage), enjoying free drinks and appetizers on a handsome portion thereof. It was pretty glamorous. He became officially single, but not for long.
We moved to a ‘studio flat,’ a former sanatorium two hours north west of Berlin by train and bus, plus some ten to twenty minutes more of electric scooter or traipsing. It was our habitation in actuality and studio rather in theory (and on tax papers). We had made grand plans of shooting mumblecore films, hosting Weimar fests and running ballroom culture walks. It was a found gem. It was not a magnificent residence (though it had its charm and our fantasy endowed it with grandeur) but it was huge and cheap as hell.