Berlin-Warszawa Express Page 2

  As the sun rose, we realized that it was time to leave for Groningen and Stagger was the only one fit to drive, even though he couldn’t drive stick. As he sipped his coffee behind the wheel, he tried not to stall as he motioned with smiling eyes at the little bag I’d taken out of my coat pocket. We both laughed, he cranked Motörhead, and I spooned some speed on the end of my house key. There was only madness now.

  I saw Ivan’s eyes open in the rear-view mirror as he caught a glimpse of Stagger snorting what was perched on the end of my key and lost it.

  “That’s it. Pull the van over,” he said, the volume in his voice increasing. “Pull the fucking van over now.”

  As we pulled to the side of the Belgian highway, hazards blinking furiously, Reservoir leapt out of the side door and bolted like a fork of lightning into the northern forest. He had the clothes on his back, his laptop bag in his right hand, and the toque on his head. He was psychotic with exhaustion, coming down, perpetually hungover, and completely lost at sea.

  Jack Valentine, just as high as we were, looked at us with wide, condemning eyes. “What the fuck, you guys?!”

  “Let him go, I’m not stopping him,” I said, twist-tying the bag shut.

  Stagger laughed. “Me neither.”

  Valentine burst out of the car, ran after Reservoir, and, with the energy of all those amphetamines in the stride of his sprint, finally caught up with him.

  From the side-view mirrors, we could see the weary and exhausted figures yelling at each other, two small black dots against the sun low in the sky, the backdrop of the Benelux highway and black woods behind them. Everything had totally collapsed. Disaster after disaster.

  The argument I imagined them having might as well have been real.

  Reservoir: “I’m getting on the first flight outta here. I’m going home. I can’t fucking take this anymore.”

  Valentine’s response came out of his mouth like a comic-book balloon, lost like us in the middle of nowhere. “How are you going to get a flight out of here, exactly? Where are you gonna go, Frankfurt? Schiphol? Brussels? How are you going to get there? How the fuck are you going to get to Frankfurt?”

  “I’ll . . . hitchhike.” The highway traffic sped by. “I’ll get to the airport, I’ll get on the next flight home to Toronto . . .”

  “No one is going to stop for you. No one will pick you up. We’re going to this show. Drink some water, get yourself together, and let’s get outta here.”

  “No, I can’t, I . . .”

  Stagger and I sat in the front seat of the van, shaking our heads and laughing. Everything except the van had broken down.

  “Is it kickin’ in yet?” I said to him with a grin, Lemmy screaming through the small, tinny, blown-out speakers.

  “Not really,” he said, “to be honest. Not really sure what all this fuckin’ fuss is about. I’m still better off to drive than anyone else here.”

  After what seemed like hours, Valentine finally coaxed Reservoir back into his place in the van.

  “I’m not cool with the driver doing speed behind the wheel,” Reservoir said.

  “Yeah sure, man, whatever, sorry,” Stagger replied. “But you’re not going home. There’s no way outta this. So buckle up.”

  I turned Lemmy back up and we kept heading north.

  A few nights after that, there was the gridlocked madness of getting stranded on the autobahn.

  “Why the fuck are we stopping?” somebody said, can’t remember who, as we ground to a halt on the highway, the snow pummelling us from all directions. We’d gone from well over one hundred and twenty clicks to not moving at all. I reached into the back and opened a Beck’s from the case we’d taken from the last venue.

  Like a common cold, the contagious sound of a cracking beer cap echoed and within a few hours everyone—except Reservoir, the driver—was well on their way to being completely wasted.

  “So what’s going on, anyways?” I asked him, after getting out to piss.

  “I think it’s an accident,” he said, “and what the fuck? Are you guys actually all drunk on me, already?”

  “Come on, man, what else are we gonna do?” I replied. “Besides, it’s been like four hours!”

  By that time, we’d missed our soundcheck and it was looking like there was no hope for our show. We’d called the venue and things were not sitting well.

  Another two or three hours passed. There was more fighting, can’t remember about what, and the snow continued to fall outside. I passed out for a while.

  I awoke with a jerk as the van was moving forward. Everyone else was now unconscious, except for Ivan Reservoir, still behind the wheel.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. “How long was I out?”

  “About five hours,” he spat, pissed off. “I’ve been sitting here alone and awake for five hours, man.”

  “Fuck,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  As we moved forward, inching along the autobahn, we passed an eighteen-wheeler completely rolled over, hiding behind what looked like solid walls of snow. Someone had extinguished a fire. There were three cars, in pieces, surrounding it. Nothing was left of the driver’s cabin, the windshield was crumpled, a door was off its hinges.

  Reservoir had a thousand-yard stare and we both sat speechless as the wheels slowly turned. I looked out the passenger side window at the accident, the sound of three sleeping bodies conducting the steady rhythm of the van driving forward through the night.

  The tour ended in Switzerland. It was about eight p.m. in Winterthur, and we had two shows to go. We’d loaded into the bar, soundchecked, and were eating dinner with the promoter as we brought up the weather report.

  There was a monumental storm headed our way, through Germany and down into Switzerland, and planes were being grounded on runways all across the continent. We had tonight in Winterthur, and then the following evening down south in Locarno, and then we faced an eighteen-hour drive to London after the show before flying home.

  The weather had been getting worse all week. Highway traffic was always gridlocked, and the trips across Switzerland were getting longer because of the near-standstills on the mountain passes through the Alps. The can of worms had opened. Should we cancel tomorrow night? Otherwise, it looked like we weren’t going home for Christmas.

  “I’ve never cancelled a show,” Reservoir said. “I just don’t feel right about this. We should take our chances and head there. Finish the tour properly, on a good note.”

  “Man, I’ve never cancelled a show either,” I said. “But let’s look at the facts. Think about what we’ve been through. We don’t need this.”

  The promoter sat, pensive at his computer, and exhaled cigarette smoke. “Well,” he said. “It seems you guys have to make a choice.”

  After another hour of arguing over beers, Stagger and Billiards left to go outside to smoke, and Valentine, Reservoir, and I stayed inside to make a decision. After another fifteen minutes, tonight in Winterthur was going to be our final show.

  After that, you can only admit defeat. Disaster, after disaster, after disaster. With all of the fighting, arguing, resentment, and now this cancellation: it felt like it had all been for nothing. In a moment like that, you get swallowed by solemnity. Reservoir got up from the table and went outside. Valentine waited for a few more minutes and did the same. I stayed at the table, smoking, staring into my drink.

  The promoter got up to use the bathroom, and as I went to refill my glass, I caught a glimpse of an email on his screen from the Locarno promoter, after he’d sent them the news. I clenched my fists when I read the message: “These guys are fucking crazy.”

  I took my beer out into the snow and walked around outside in the cold for a while. We all reconvened at the venue and played our last show of the tour, which was cut short because of sound restrictions, and everyone looked pale
, as though they were going to cry. We went to another bar after the set, and Reservoir spent the last of the band fund on one round of shots and beers. We had nothing. We’d officially lost it all.

  The next morning, we got up at eight and headed straight out of Switzerland. We didn’t get to London till midnight. Gridlocked highways, French toll roads, delays on boarding the Calais–Dover ferry, and a general feeling of defeat stretched the trip to a sixteen-hour ordeal. There was no way we would’ve gotten to London on time had we played Locarno.

  Relieved, we dropped off the van, dropped off the gear, and got in a minicab to Heathrow with a small window of time left to catch our flights that took off at midnight. But immediately upon arrival we knew something was wrong.

  The airport was bedlam and panic: pallets of bottled water had been forklifted at random places on the floor. Lineups around the baggage drop-off desks stretched for miles. There were people shivering underneath silver blankets that had been supplied by the Salvation Army. It was like a disaster film.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Reservoir asked a British Airways worker.

  “Heathrow is closed, mate,” he replied. “Nothing is taking off. All the planes have been grounded.”

  Fuck it, I thought. We cracked a bottle of liquor that we’d snuck through the border and started pounding it. We gathered pieces of cardboard, plastic, and velvet rope dividers and, bit by bit, built us a fort, the way you did when you were at home, a young kid in the summer. We unrolled our sleeping bags beneath the cardboard and plastic roof, laughing our asses off, shots of vodka carrying us off to a better place and time, our last chance for happiness.

  Valentine went off to the bathroom and a few minutes later I followed, really having to piss. I saw him standing over a sink, flossing, and what looked like pints of blood gushing out his mouth and circling down the drain. His red, drunken eyes looked at me through the mirror, and my eyebrows rose in disbelief.

  “Looks like you’re not the only one losing your teeth.”

  From his spitting out the massive amounts of blood that were forming in his gums, the sink was a deep, bloody crimson, and the blood wasn’t slowing.

  I left the bathroom and rejoined James, Ivan, and Stag, still howling and laughing together under the fort. For a tiny second I imagined that the fort wasn’t made of garbage and airport benches and discarded trash, but something from a better, sunnier time, and then we all descended into sleep.

  We woke in the morning to airport security ripping apart our makeshift hideaway. They took the velvet rope dividers and walked all over our sleeping bags, stomping and swearing, frantically setting up queues around the check-in counters, crushing our ditched effort for joy.

  “Come on,” I said, still drunk. “Give us a break, what the fuck . . .”

  “Up,” they kept repeating. “Up.”

  We spent the next four days and five nights on the floor of that airport. You couldn’t leave in case your flight was called, in case the BAA decided to let planes take off, and if you weren’t there to jump in the queue, then there was no telling how much longer you’d have to wait before you were called again. So we waited.

  “Give us shovels,” I remember the Canadians chanting in an exasperated unison while lying on the shivering floor in Heathrow Airport. “Give us fucking shovels and we’ll shovel the runway, and we’ll be in the sky in fifteen minutes.”

  You never actually realize how many people walk through the gates of an airport on any given day, because you never see them all at once. In security checkpoints, baggage claims, or departure gates, there are thousands at any given time. Because the lines keep moving, the magnitude of those numbers gets lost on you. The drunk, the poor, the rich, the famous, the happy, and the sad, they’re all there, but over the course of the day they just become an anonymous wash of bodies.

  At Heathrow that week, all of London—good and bad—was jammed into one cold place and told to stand still. Nobody was getting through those big automatic doors. The airport had become an insane asylum, the lunatics had seized control, and it was Christmas. Flickering lights advertised the duty frees and holiday discounts, and the airport bar was full of dishevelled men in Santa caps swiping worn and faded Mastercards. There was a hazy smell of booze in the air that in another time and place could’ve been easily mistaken for holiday cheer.

  At one point I saw a junkie huddled on the floor, shaking without a fix. I’m sure his mom or dad had forked over the quid for the plane ticket. He was probably headed home for the holidays and had lined up a score at his destination, but here, trapped in Heathrow, he was helpless.

  A toothless man scribbled frantically on a large sheet of paper as his caretaker nurse watched over him. Tiny little bottles of whiskey, empty, sat dead beside him. A drunk, red-faced English pub brute yelled in the face of an airline worker as she tried to calm him down. Parents with kids, all in tears, were everywhere, and crying babies, with the smell of shit from their dirty diapers, made the whole place stink while the bathroom lineups grew a thousand miles long. All around me, men with loose neckties were on the phone to their wives at home, screaming with panic and hysteria into the receiver. There was uproar. You couldn’t even get nice and properly hammered, as the fear of passing out and missing your chance to board a plane overwhelmed you.

  By December 23, some of us were herded like cattle into a tent outside, in the freezing cold, because the terminal had become too full and there weren’t enough bathrooms for everybody. Reservoir was nowhere to be found, and Stagger, Billiards, and Valentine had all gotten flights home. I was the only one left.

  People were throwing up around me. Everyone had stayed up for days at a time in hopes of hearing their name called so they could catch a plane. Among us was an elderly couple heading off to see their kids for the holidays, and now this eighty-year-old woman and her husband shook with feverish cold, clutching stale cups of coffee underneath a thin sheet that had been given to them by the British Airways Authority. I was worried they both might die.

  It was at that point that my name was called, and I was the last to be squeezed onto a plane to Canada that day. Running through the terminal, I never even looked back at all the people I was leaving behind. The plane took off through the cold grey English sky, and I waved a bitter goodbye to 2010.

  When I finally got to my parents’ house in Edmonton, my mom cried the minute I walked through the door. I’d lost about thirteen pounds and I hadn’t yet told her about my teeth. With the rampant drug use and constant drinking, the sleepless nights, the weather and the misery, I probably had bags under my eyes that looked like they could hold snooker balls.

  Despite it all, I kept thinking of Berlin, like a ringing bell resonating in the waves across the fields of Brandenburg, the North German Plain, and the Atlantic Ocean. The ominous might of the TV Tower, the liberating thinness of the Wall, the optimism in everybody’s faces, the crowded midnight streets: it was like a dream that was still going on without me through every waking hour of every day. Because of all these things, Berlin seemed to rise like a phoenix from the fire of war, communism, and harsh cold winters, and through and over everything, I could hear the chanting: Berlin, Berlin, Berlin.

  I spent the next year plotting my return as hundreds of Canadians and Americans all moved there in a mass exodus from North America. Moving to Berlin had become a kind of craze. I didn’t want to jump on that train, though: I had in mind something infinitely more special, something that began at zero in all directions. I wanted to see Berlin like an artist, and not just someone who goes there with the hopes of being one, only to waste away their thoughts and dreams and ambitions in the back room of a dark German club. The answer was to tour and tour and tour.

  A successful trip through Canada that took me to Victoria, B.C., and back to Toronto in about twenty-five days was the biggest focus of 2011, and, like a gargantuan itch in my brain, all I could think about was how
much I wanted to return to Europe. Despite the catastrophe of the previous trip, I still loved the people, the audiences, the cities, the long, majestic ways the roads and trains seemed to stretch over the land like lines on an open palm. You could start to read these palms, I imagined, if you could just go there enough and become a part of the land and be invited into the geography, like the thousands of travelling musicians who had traversed its distances before you. If you could speak the language of the soil and breathe the air of the continent then it might just make you one of its own.

  So there I was a few years later, on another long, long haul across the European continent. I’d started out in England opening for a Canadian songwriter named Julia Elaine, and we parted ways after two and a half weeks. She went across the channel to the Netherlands via Brussels for a few more weeks of shows alone.

  Meanwhile, I headed east to Berlin to meet up with Wilfred Manifesto. We were to venture through East Germany, the former DDR, and play some shows in Poland and the Czech Republic, music dragging us by the ear across the continent. The earthly circumference of the railroad was about to carve crevices through our consciousness. These crevices are the memories that remain.

  I remember being so thrilled to be back in Berlin. I was climbing up the stairs to my friend Exene’s apartment, and within me there was this strange feeling, like having a fist closed tight in your gut and stars in your eyes at the same time.

  I had met Exene in a tavern in Toronto that was lit by candlelight, introduced myself, and, just like that, she said I could stay with her when I arrived. I was so taken by that. With nothing more than a handshake and a hello, we had gained each other’s trust.

  “Yeah, so call me when you’re in Berlin in May, and you can stay with us for however long you want.” It was February.