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At around 5:30 a.m., a dozen or so beers and two viles deep, I realized I was having trouble holding in my pee. See, the problem with Berlin is that they don’t have toilet seats to sit on at the club. Not that I would recommend ever sitting on them unless you're piss drunk to the point where you can’t see. I was teetering on that. I’d try to hover, gripping my skirt to avoid pee staining it, just low enough that it wouldn’t trickle down my legs into my boots.
I failed at performing a basic human task that we were trained to do from a very early age. Nothing was coming out. By the time I’d stand up after struggling to hover, it would let go in my skort. This happened four times. Four times I’d hoped to god that I could just pee a stream, I could so easily do squatting in an alleyway. Nothing. Swimsuit material or not, I could feel it.
“Ugh, I hate 3mmc, it makes you smell like cat piss!” B told me a couple of days after I got back. I should’ve stayed in my piss soaked mini skirt, what did it even matter? I was even told at Bowie about Berghain's piss hole that we completely missed. “There’s a hole in the ground that goes straight into someone's mouth.” The Piss Goblin? Fuck. I would’ve been terrible at it, considering my aim.
For the rest of the night at Aedan, or morning, we sat with the Chilean guys we had just met as they told us about tagging while doing bumps off their credit card. We told them about the Cafeteria in return.
I had gotten the skirt as a gift from C one day when I was sitting at 96 Tears and trying on their new slouch tees. Two sizes too big, I held it up using a comically large Hanna-Barbera-style safety pin.
The skirt was worn almost every day in Berlin. It saw both night and day. On Tuesday, we took it to Church near the Fernsehturm. “I don’t think I’m dressed appropriately for this,” I told M.
“Just cover your shoulders,” he replied, pulling up my sleeves to cover my bra straps. I looked down to see 3/4 of my bare legs exposed, and then my torso to the long sleeve I had on. On Wednesday, it saw evil Berlin Angel Money and her B2B partner spin at Phantom Bar, a velvet den made for reformed drainers turned opium-heads and one single American.
On Thursday, the fateful piss night, it first made an appearance at Ficken 3000. We’d missed the porn screening by 3 hours, but it played on every screen you could find throughout the night. The film looked as though it was shot in the basement of the club, all in black and white, unless I entered into dog vision at some point. All I could think about was how incredible the lighting was — how could someone capture the curvature of a bottom's arch so beautifully? Shadows that illuminated a vaginal hole. Stunning, even though I can only retain 10 full seconds of memory of the film.
It was pinched, yanked, and honked in the basement. Ficken was my first intro to Berlin. As I sat on a couch smoking with M, which led to a Turkish man telling me how his incredibly large penis wouldn’t be able to fit in my vagina, but we could try. It apparently wasn’t able to with most. I think he was wearing a durag. He then asked me if I’d like my mephedrone cut with ketamine. Later that night, I almost burned a hole in it, meeting L from Toronto. We talked about how similar our upbringings had been, smoking near the staff stairs of Aedan. We might have talked for hours about Toronto, how much she hated it and how much I loved it.
On Friday, our last night out, the skirt found itself at Arkaoda first for RegularFantasy. For a brief moment, we danced, beer spilling all over the skirt near the decks. However, it mostly sat in the candlelit upstairs lounge where S spoke about spirituality and purpose. Coming out of a three-day fever, S was rejuvenated and had lust for meaning and the beauty of life once again. Their joie de vivre was back. I was pretty high at this point, but I remember him saying something along the lines of “everyone has a type of god.”
I’ve found myself consistently thinking how I’d rather believe in something rather than devote my life to the fearfulness of nothing. You can’t force yourself to believe in a specific religion or entity; you can try, but it won’t be as real as being drawn to it. That’s why I hate Hare Krishnas, or more so, missionaries.
I don’t give a rat's ass fuck about convincing someone to look upon someone else's God for solis, it doesn’t feel right. That being said, would it be so wrong of me to fake my devotion to Catholicism to find peace and discipline in joining a nunnery? They won’t have cocaine there! They might have cigarettes, that’s my deal breaker.
The skirt did go to Berghain that night. A whimsical mess of an establishment, where Zionism is welcomed by the established management and probably hated by the service staff. God, that building is beautiful. What you expect isn’t what you get. Berghain is fun until the drugs run out and the sun is shining in your face, shrinking your pupils to nothing. Once you’ve reached pure blindness. We’d made it to drum and bass night. Or was it jungle? It doesn’t matter; however, it did matter when we were at the door.
“Who’s playing tonight?” He asked.
“We’re here to see Sneckers,” S said.
“Who?” He replied.
“Sneckers. They’re playing right now.”
Straight out of a fucking schizophrenic Mr. Bean episode, the door guy looked at the schedule and back at us. It happened very slowly, and without my glasses, he looked like he was smiling and giggling silently. Apparently, he was not. Shocker.
“No. That’s tomorrow.” We stood in silence. S should be working the door here.
“The other place we were at was whack, and we just want to have fun and dance,” S chimes in from behind us. We got in. S would also be the one to tell the door guys to come to the Cafeteria if they ever visited Toronto on the way out while they yelled “GO! GO! Move!”
It was maybe 6 a.m. when we made it there for the second time, it was a result of getting bored with the music at Oxy, and whatever secret back club we were lured to. Oh, Berghain, you stupid little faux-sex pest. Sure, you can dance, but what do you mean I watched a woman go down on a man as we waited to pick up? I thought this shit was supposed to be gay? Is the German gaydar so completely off? You must also beware, it’s as though the Nazi convention rolls into town at the burning hours, just as hell comes out with the sun rising.
You can’t really tell the difference between sigylism tattoos and possible fascist dogwhistle symbols. I’d never seen so many blonde, white, blue-eyed people in my life. I don’t understand anti-immigration; why would you want to be around that many white people that smell like eroding coins in a vat of vinegar? Why would you want to be around that many white people sweating 4mmc out, a combination of natural body odour and pool cleaner? I mustn’t be so mean to Montreal.
The skirt sat tucked in my suitcase while I was looking for a smoking lounge at the Stockholm airport. The fucking Stockholm Airport. At around 15, Mr. True Crime and the world's #2 Schizophrenic patient, after Sartre, Ryan Murphy released American Horror Story: Hotel. I devoted my teen years to this show, and I was such a fucking fool for doing so.
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To go back in time and slap myself so deeply in my face that it would write a thank you letter to my future self that I would have to view every day in the mirror would have done me a favour. Sorry! It was a shit season. Regardless, James March, who owned the Hotel Cortez in the show, was based on H.H. Holmes’s real-life maze-like murder hotel.
That is what the Stockholm airport feels like. Once you finally find the “smoking lounge,” you’re introduced to a shame pod fashioned in the style of a Bauhause chrome ashtray. The airport was as if a United Colours of Beniton commercial teamed up with a biology textbook to create what they assume to be provocative art of the 2000s universal diversity era.
Soon, it found itself having staring contests with Greek men who win after they make a little kissy face. I wore it throughout my “sobriety” with S, where I vowed to cleanse my entire body before ultimately crashing it out back in Toronto on my first night back. Piss became sand, and I finally read a book after two long years.
Cookie Mueller taught me two things while wearing that skirt: You should fall in love with men who are gay, but if you do end up in a lesbian relationship, never honeymoon in Italy, and acid dens are essential for your 20s. I can’t do acid, not after what happened on New Year's 2024. I, however, am more than happy to swap that out for speed. Do you know how productive it is to trap three people in the room with a bag of speed? 75%, at most.
She climbed a wall in a mini skirt. The internet says it was “The Berlin Wall,” but I think that was purely a joke. I didn’t climb a wall, but I did use it as an ashtray at some point.
The skirt made its way to Warsaw, where I had an 11-hour layover. Stupidly, I had booked my tickets back home drunk. God was watching over me because tucked into my Telfar bag, the skirt was soon at the last 30 minutes at Miami Wars. What was basically a party by the river, I smoked on a rooftop patio. I soon found myself in an apartment, listening to records, talking about selling out, Asha Bosley, and drinking… a martini? I don’t really remember going through security at Chopin.
“Tell everyone that Warsaw is terrible and you hate it, so it doesn’t get [gentrified]!” B told me.
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