Berlin Diarrhea

So one night I was sitting in some little cafe by the harbor and a Rastafarian approached me, offering me beautiful hand-carved necklaces. I bought a few of them for very little money and then the fellow, who had yellow eyes, beautiful long fingers, Medusa dreadlocks and a dark black handsome face, said, "Do you smoke ganja?"

"I'm not supposed to," I said, with all the sober fortitude of a jellyfish.

I'd had a terrible crack experience?is there a good crack experience??just a few weeks before and was trying to stay off drugs and alcohol. So I didn't have a permission slip for smoking ganja, but the next thing you know I was in the black part of the island?away from the white, tourist-harbor area?and I smoked the two most powerful fat joints of my life with my new friend and a hole was punctured in my mind.

We were sitting outside a bar, which was just a tin shack that sold rum. An unseen radio played reggae and the people were dressed like pirates?they wore mismatched clothes from different parts of the world, as if fashion, like debris, had washed up on the island, and they were beautiful, the men and women, as they moved in the hot night, the dirt road in front of the shack serving as a dance floor.

There was one other white person besides me: a woman in her 50s with a rope of gray hair that ran to the middle of her back. She was skinny and had a sexy swing of longing to her hips. The men danced with her; she was clearly looking for a lover; and then I saw her go off with a young man who held her close, his arm enveloping her shoulders, her whole frail body, and her braid of hair was like a tail. They receded into the darkness beyond the bar.

My friend, who sat there with me smoking and watching the people dance, told me that his life philosophy was "no promise, no plan," which enabled him to be free, answering to no one, promising nothing, unless the spirits drew him to someone, as they had drawn him to me, a fellow artist, he felt, and so he was happy to share his ganja with me. But then I left him, because I thought I might vomit my brain out of my mouth. I don't know what that pot was laced with, and I staggered for some time, lost, and then like something out of a Paul Bowles story I was chased down a starlit beach by three young men who wanted to have fun with me. They were taunting me, calling me "boy"?they must have perceived how stoned I was?and I escaped into the jungle, which came right up to the beach, and I ran through a thick grove of coconut trees in the dark, fallen branches cutting my arms, until I emerged on a narrow hilly road, having lost my pursuers.

Paranoid and frightened, I hiked back down to the harbor, to my little inn, where I lay in my mosquito netting, writing feverishly for several hours in my journal about the races of man, and the terrible race we were all engaged in?I had never seen before the double meaning of the word race, it was one of those stoner revelations?and I made an elaborate diagram of the Earth with blacks in the southern hemisphere, yellows and browns in the middle, and whites in the north, and all of them, all of us, engaged in war.

A year later I looked at the diagram on the plane to Europe and was mildly horrified at my stoned ramblings and drawing, but the good news was I had been sober ever since that night. A friend told me that if I didn't stop getting abused by drugs and alcohol I would die in some terrible way and my 16-year-old son would have to live with this legacy. This warning got to me, and after I returned from Bequia I managed to clean up my act yet again. But now I was on my way to Amsterdam, the city of two H's, hash and Heineken, for the publication of my silly memoir, What's Not to Love?, and I was worried that I would fall off the wagon. For years I've been more on the wagon than off, though the goal of course is to just stay on, but when I travel I've often tipped the cart.

My problem?well, one of my problems?has been the inability to disabuse myself of some romantic notions about booze and exotic settings, and so while I've had the good fortune over the years to travel to Russia, Mexico, France, Italy, Cuba and Bequia, I've made disasters of these trips by trying to drink, and not accepting the damn fact that some people can enjoy alcohol, while other people, like me, want to enjoy it, but end up blacking out, vomiting, doing drugs and engaging in sexual fantasies that are better left fantasies, if you know what I mean, which I'm sure many of you do.

So it was not without trepidation that I disembarked in the Netherlands. Little did I know that first morning when I got out of the plane that booze and drugs would not be a problem for me on this journey, but rather the largest pimple of my life.

November 7

My hotel was called the Ambassade, a former 17th-century residence, and was located on the Herengracht, one of the many pretty canals that ring Amsterdam like the circles of a tree. When I checked in it was 2:30 a.m. according to my body clock, but 8:30 a.m. according to more important clocks, and I was too wired to sleep anyway, so I went to the dining room for breakfast. There was a man who bore a striking resemblance to the writer Ian McEwan?greasy gray-black hair, thick glasses, a face like Stephen Hawking's but without the torque, but I thought, "It can't be him." So I didn't say anything to the man, and what would I have said anyway? I've only read one of McEwan's novels, which I liked very much?it was his first, The Cement Garden?but complimenting him on that book would be like the time I saw John Updike in a deli and complimented him on his early novel, The Centaur, the only book of his I've read, thus ignoring years of output, and I didn't want to make the same mistake if this was McEwan. Later I learned it was indeed him, that almost all visiting writers to Amsterdam stay at the Ambassade, but I didn't see him again and it's just as well.

After breakfast I had two interviews about my book. I felt embarrassed that while the world is going mad?destruction of the environment, hatred between cultures?journalists should be spending their time on a subject like yours truly, though, of course, I hadn't balked at the chance for a free trip for yours truly, one of the points of which was to talk to journalists. So I felt mildly ashamed about the whole thing, but in some ways it's reassuring that the world?at least some parts?wants to continue its middle-class pursuit of reading books and reading articles about people who write books. I answered questions as playfully as I could, making sure to let the interviewers know that I am simply a literary clown and my goal is to bring some laughs to people, that perhaps this has some value and meaning in our world, whatever it is that value and meaning mean, if you know what I mean.

One interviewer asked me if I was a Shakespearean clown?one who tells the truth?or just a circus clown, and I didn't know what to say, though my ego, I must admit, liked the notion of being a Shakespearean clown and I said as much. I mean anything Shakespearean, just ask Harold Bloom, is pretty good. Another interviewer asked me why I wrote an autobiography, and I said it was an auto-erotic-biography since there's so much in the book about masturbation, but despite his excellent English he didn't seem to get the joke.

That afternoon I walked around Amsterdam and it was very beautiful and so bourgeois?everyone riding on bicycles or taking trams; numerous cafes and gourmet shops; all of it just so incredibly pleasant. I couldn't help but think, as many have before me, which is probably why I thought it, how the Europeans really have mastered the middle-class existence. In America, the middle-class eat odorless cheeses that come in phony plastic-wrapped slices, and in Europe the middle-class eat fresh cheeses that could be used as stink-bombs by riot police. See the difference between America and Europe? Quelle luxe over there.

That night I attended the opening performances of the Crossing Border Festival, the literature and music festival that I was a part of, and I saw a huge Sicilian funeral band, for which the American equivalent would be a high school marching band, since such bands usually play while parading down the streets of Sicily in funeral pageants. But in Amsterdam this many-piece marching band was sitting in a fancy symphony hall, with an enormous, ancient chandelier hovering over all of us in the audience that could have killed hundreds should it have fallen, which is only fitting since this funeral orchestra was already in place.

Afterward I went and walked around the famous Red Light District and found it to be quite disenchanting. There were hundreds of women behind these body-length windows and you could peer at them in their little cells as they sat on stools and behind them there was usually a dreary cot with a dreary towel. And while many of the women had beautiful bodies, their faces were destroyed. Last year I watched the filming of a porn video in California, and seeing these Amsterdam prostitutes I thought of what the head of lighting on the porn set had said to me about young porn actresses after they've been in the business a while:

"They get that whore face. A face that's seen too much."

These Amsterdam women had that face. Even if their features were beautiful they were ugly, though ugly is not quite the right word. Maybe dead is the right word. Their faces were dead. They had seen too much and they had been seen too much?thousands of drunken tourists promenade every night through the narrow corridors of the Red Light District gawking at these women, like exhibits in a freak show, being looked at that way must do something to you. And of course there's the job itself: sucking on thousands of terrible cocks every year, or having the men on top of you with their stinking bodies, fucking your vagina or your ass. It's all too much. I'm sorry to be such a prude; I've certainly done my share of whoring, which, if I think about it, is probably why I am being so squeamish and sensitive and prudish. Once a philosopher, twice a pervert, 943 times a prude?that's me.

So I found it all quite dispiriting, though I did walk around through many alleyways, looking at lots of these women in their prison-windows?it was like I was trolling the beach at the ocean, hoping to come across one perfect shell. And I did eventually find one young girl who didn't have that face just yet. She was small and dark and beautiful, probably from one of the old Dutch colonies in the Philippines. After I saw her, beautiful shell found but not collected, I trudged back to my hotel.

November 8

I did more interviews in the morning and the afternoon, and then in the evening, in a smoky theater that held about 200 people, I gave a performance on the same bill as David Sedaris. When I came off the stage to nice applause I was in the middle of a sea of people, kind well-wishers, and then the sea parted just a little, and I was approached by an older, sexy woman in a shawl. She pressed on me a card.

"We should meet up in New York and talk about doing something together," she said. I looked down at the card: Xaviera Hollander. The name didn't register at first, but then it hit me.

"I used to read you all the time in Penthouse as a young boy. It's an honor to meet you," I gushed. It was the Happy Hooker herself. Her face wasn't dead and she smiled at me, stroked my cheek with her hand, and said, "We'll meet in New York," and then she disappeared back into the crowd. What she was doing in Amsterdam I have no idea.

That night I stayed out late with all the people from my publishing house and they drank beer after beer and smoked cigarette after cigarette and I absorbed enough secondhand smoke to give myself, Mayor Bloomberg and all the five boroughs cancer. But I didn't drink and didn't want to, which was very pleasing.

November 9

In the morning I made an appointment at this place called Koan Float, where I could go into a sensory deprivation tank. I'd always wanted to try one of those and the place was right next to my hotel. How it works is this: You get your own room with a shower and a tank and are given instructions to put vaseline-like gel over any open cuts. The attendant left me in my room and the powder-blue tank looked like the backside of an extinct AMC Pacer, a doomed car I always admired for its fat ass.

I showered off and climbed naked into the tank, which is filled with about two feet of warm salt water, and then pulled the hatch closed, which was just like the hatch on the back of the old Pacer. I was in complete darkness. There were buttons along the wall of the tank for lights, music, intercom!?in case you started to panic you could contact the girl at the front desk?but I preferred to be in darkness without musical accompaniment. The salt water immediately buoyed me and I floated there like a turd in a toilet, which is apt since the one area on my body that began to sting was my rectum, which has been itchy for about 15 years now. I don't know what the hell the problem is down there. I go to a doctor about every five years and I always forget to ask about my ass. I'll have to do a search on the Internet: "itchy rectum."

My ass stung because I'm always irritating it further by scratching and picking it, the same way I madly pick my nose. The worst is when I pick my nose after I pick my ass, having forgotten that I've picked my ass, and I wonder why my finger smells like I've changed a diaper, and then I remember and I sort of wish in those moments that somebody would come along and just shoot me, and then I wonder if other people have fingers laced with feces, other people like chefs and waiters. I really shouldn't be let out of the house, let alone sent all the way to civilized Europe.

After 40 minutes I came out of the tank and I was blissfully happy. I walked along the beautiful Amsterdam canals and I wondered why I ever have worries in life. All anxiety and nervousness and persistent feelings of doom had been leeched out of me by that tank. I was euphoric. It was beautiful!

Well, the gods were observing me, because at the zenith of my happiness I then stepped in a huge wet pile of diarrhea dog shit, which is such a cliche, but it actually happened. But this didn't dent my delightful spiritual state. What dented my state was that I ate an enormous breakfast at the hotel after the tank experience and I felt like my gut was going to explode. On top of everything else in life I have Infuriated Bowel Syndrome and had been nervously waiting for my guts to detonate on this trip and wreak havoc, and now the moment had arrived. All of us live with the threat of terrorists outside us; I've got an Al Qaeda network right inside my colon.

So I rushed out of the dining room and up four flights to my room and the maid was there. The gods love to test me! I chewed on my finger for five minutes and pretended to read a book while she cleaned the tub and I didn't know if my sphincter was going to make it?I should try to do sphincter exercises in my spare time?and I was unsure if there was a toilet in the lobby four floors below. I decided the best course of action was to wait there in the room. I kept rechanneling the gas and the fecal matter into weird interior pockets in my gut. Finally the maid left, and like Tiger Woods sinking a clutch putt I got the pants down without incident?such moments in my life are my only chances at athletic heroism?and I sat on the toilet and blew myself up. What a relief.

That evening I gave another reading with Sedaris and a writer named Mark Danielewski. After the reading I spoke to Danielewski, author of what looks like a fascinating book, House of Leaves, which, naturally, I haven't read since I avoid most contemptuous, I mean contemporary, literature. Despite my ignorance of his work I was anxious to talk to this fellow because I went to school with his sister, the rock singer Poe, and I once saw her in a school play in which she appeared, quite memorably, without her shirt on. Why this made me anxious to talk to him is unclear. I guess I felt compelled to point out the odd coincidence that I should vaguely know his sister and here we were reading together in a literary festival in Amsterdam.

We had a nice chat, turns out he had come with his sister to hear me read years ago but had forgotten my name and face, which is perfectly understandable, but it was all coming back to him now, and then the conversation moved on to our American publishers, and I felt the chip on my shoulder enflame. Like most writers, I have a herpes-like chip on my shoulder when it comes to publishers. It's like herpes because I'll have it the rest of my life. No writer is without such a chip, even silly writers like me.

So it wasn't Danielewski's fault, but I found myself growing sullen, and perhaps because I was now in a bad mood I noticed that he had a largish lump on his forehead, like half a pingpong ball was under the skin. He's a good-looking fellow, looks a lot like D.H. Lawrence in fact, but I began to stare at this lump. Well, our conversation petered out, probably because I was focusing on the ball in the middle of his forehead, wondering if it was his third eye, and we went our separate ways.

Later that evening, I watched a band with Sedaris and his boyfriend Hugh. I remarked, "Did you notice that Mark Danielewski had a sort of growth-lump on his forehead?"

It was a mean thing for me to say, a reaction to my earlier talk with Danielewski about publishers, and Sedaris said he hadn't noticed any lump, and then we went into this bar in the Milkway and Danielewski was there and I elbowed Sedaris. The three of us talked for a little while and then I left with Sedaris and I said, "Did you see that lump? What do you think it is?"

"I think it's just a bruise," said Sedaris.

"I think it's a lump. It's too perfectly round to be a bruise, like there's a superball under the skin," I said.

"I think it's just a bruise," said Sedaris, and I felt foolish and petty.

Then Sedaris had to leave with Hugh, and feeling lonely and mildly insane I went to the Red Light District to this bar, I think it was called the Banana Bar. I had heard that women did depraved things with bananas in there and thought I should witness such a thing at least once in life, having often been told tales about similar bars in Bangkok where ladies play pingpong with their vaginas, which makes sense since Asians are very good at that sport.

Come to think of it, if Mark Danielewski went to Bangkok?which is a hell of a name, I've always thought, for a sex-crazed city, but very clever marketing for their booming prostitution-tourist industry?he'd have a wonderful time with the women, since they could sit on his pingpong ball and do all sorts of magical things.

Anyway, I paid 40 euros, roughly $40, to get in the Banana Bar, and I have to say that Europe seems somewhat neutered having only one currency now, but they say change is good, even if the change, I mean coinage, isn't very pretty anymore. So those 40 euros bought me an hour in the place and all I could drink, though all I was going to have was Coca-Cola.

The joint had two levels, with two bars, and was packed with drunk British fellows. The bars were actually stages, and on each bar were five naked women, handing out drinks from a squatting or sitting position, so while they served drinks men looked right into these nice ladies' vaginas. These women were all of a similar body type: big and voluptuous, with wide asses and pendulous breasts, shaved genitals and shiny skin like seals. They all seemed to be in their mid-to-late 30s, and it was a politically correct and diversified assembly, since they were white, black, Asian. Unlike the girls in the windows on the street, these ladies were merry, laughing, vulgar and bawdy, like something out of Chaucer or Breughel.

The women performed a variety of lewd acts, and each woman seemed to have a specialty. You could pay her to do her specialty, but the more economical thing to do was purchase a five-act performance, engaging all the women for about 75 euros, and I lucked out in that a group of Brits bought their pal Alan this package deal, since it was his 50th birthday.

Act One was that he got to massage this black lady, rubbing moisturizer all over her ass, legs, breasts. He was a blue-collar-looking fellow with cropped hair and gnarled hands, and he was rather drunk, and I wondered if he had a wife back in England.

Act Two was a dark-haired white woman who put whipped cream on her nipples and he was allowed to suck it off, and then she put whipped cream on her shaved groin and he lapped that up.

The next gal, a blonde?Act Three?put a dildo in her pussy and had Alan stand back from the bar and she shot the dildo out of her pussy and hit him in the chest. He gave her back the dildo, which he picked up off the floor; she dipped it in a bucket of water and then shot it at him again, and this happened several times while his friends cheered and laughed. Then she had him climb up on the stage and put the dildo in his zipper and held it there, and then she had him mount her and they sort of copulated, with the dildo acting as his cock. When he got off her, she grabbed the eyeglasses off one of his friends, a short little intoxicated man wearing a foolish red fez, and she rubbed the spectacles on her pussy and then put the smeared lenses back on the fellow, who smiled happily.

Then came the banana?Act Four?the piece de resistance. A nice Asian woman put a condom on a banana?I guess so no food diseases, FTDs, would get in her?and she began to insert the banana in herself from various positions, giving a whole new meaning to banana split. Then she lay back on the bar, holding on to the banana with her vagina, so that it stuck out of her, and she rolled down the loose end of the condom and peeled the banana about halfway. This done, she took a knife and with a quick flick of her wrist, like a Jewish mohel, she sculpted a penile head on the banana. Then she put a dollop of whip cream on the head of the banana penis and made Alan give her a blowjob, and then he had to eat the banana out of her pussy. This homoerotic twist of him playing a fruit while eating a fruit was rather ingenious.

Act Five was another Asian woman who squatted over the bar, put a pen in her vagina and placed a postcard (with a picture of the Banana Bar) beneath her, and then with her vagina and a slight sway of her hips she wrote, "Happy Birthday Alan." I leaned in, a nosy voyeur, and was quite impressed with the girl's penmanship.

I pulled away from the bar and saw the man in the fez take off his glasses, sniff them for a second to amuse one of his pals, and then he cleaned them on his shirt, an action he had clearly performed thousands of times.

November 10

The next morning I had a train to catch to Berlin; my novel The Extra Man had just come out in Germany and I was to give some readings. I went to the bathroom to wash up and saw that my right nostril had doubled in size, that there was a small red marble under the skin. Back in the States I had been viciously picking my nose and I had infected my nostril, probably by picking my nose with a staph-infected digit, which I probably got from shaking hands with a waiter.

I thought the nostril problem had more or less cleared up before the trip, but now it was back and the cyst I had created was pushing out of the nostril. My bad-mouthing of Danielewski the night before had already borne fruit! A red fruit on my nose! This was terrible. How could I go to Germany on a book tour with such a thing on my nose? On my Jewish nose! The Germans would kill me. They would have to change the tally: Six million and one!

There was nothing to do but to press on with my book tour and try to rely on the basic truth of human nature, which is that normal people are too self-involved to really look at one another, that no one would notice my nostril, that in fact only idiots like me perceive pingpong balls on foreheads and marbles on nostrils.

So I went to the train station and on my platform Sedaris and Hugh were boarding a train to Paris. I called out to them over the noises of the train station?they paused in the door, smiled in recognition and waved?"I'm sorry for what I said about Danielewski's forehead! David, you're right. It probably was a bruise! Now my nose has erupted. I'm going on a book tour in Germany with an enflamed nostril! I don't know if I can handle this!"

Sedaris and Hugh didn't say anything and continued to wave goodbye?good riddance??but looked at me like I was nuts and then disappeared into their train. I staggered off to a bench and looked at pigeons dallying suicidally on the tracks and considered pulling an Anna Karenina. How much more foolish could I become?

November 11-16

The remaining days of my trip are a bit of a blur; the growth on my nose had the effect of an alcoholic binge. The thing grew larger and larger, making it hard for me to think of anything else. The German photographers who took my picture for various newspapers shot me from only one side, like I was Streisand.

I was in East Berlin many years ago, before the Wall came down, and that part of the city is now wildly transformed. It had been dead and quiet like a prison yard, but now it is alive with commerce and cars and people. I went to this one cafe in East Berlin, a trendy place called Oren, next to a reconstructed synagogue, and Chelsea Clinton was in there with her boyfriend and the two of them were kissing quite a lot. I mean communism really has fallen if an ex-president's daughter is making out in the former East Berlin, and where was a "Page Six" reporter when you needed one? I figured Chelsea was visiting Germany on a little vacation from Oxford, and I thought of inviting her to my reading that night at an erotic bookstore, but I was too shy to intrude, especially with my swollen nose.

I had to give three readings in Germany with my swollen nose, but then one night my hostess in Berlin, the German liaison to the American consulate, an elegant, charming woman whose beautiful apartment I was staying in, gave me some hydrocortisone cream she had bought in the States. I think she figured I needed an American product. So I took the cream. We didn't know what else I should do; she, too, was quite alarmed by my nose.

I repaired to the bathroom with the ointment and read that it was good for, among other things, "anal itch." Why had I never been told this? I thought how Bernie Williams had a good season for the Yankees after cortisone shots in his shoulders, so I applied some of the cream to my ass, and then put some on my ridiculous nose and went to sleep.

Well, in the middle of the night the nose burst. It was like my nostril had a wet dream, shooting out pus. When I woke up I saw myself in the mirror and white fluid was dripping out of the cyst. I had abstained, like a good houseguest, from masturbating, but it had been to no avail. There was a wet spot on the pillow. I had soiled my German hostess' guest bed! My "cyst" had revealed itself to be the largest pimple in the history of my life. It was all too much.

I rushed to the bathroom, applied some hot water to my wound, squeezed out some more pus, which is always one of life's great pleasures, and the whole nose was enflamed, but there was hope?now that the pus was starting to come out, the thing would heal.

Sure enough, by the time I returned to New York on Nov. 17 the nose, miraculously, was back to normal. I was now my regular ugly self, which I was grateful for.

I had learned a valuable lesson: Be appreciative for the ugliness you have, because it could get worse. And as an added benefit, my ass has stopped itching!

So all in all it was quite a profitable trip to Europe. I hope they publish more of my books. It's very self-improving to go over there.