Distinguished Air E-Book

Robert McAlmon

• Herausgeber: Olympia Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Earlier, more textually honest version of the author's account of gay/trans life in Berlin that was later reprinted in "Rustle of Black Silk Stockings," as originally published by his own press in Paris.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Distinguished Air

The Lodging House

Distinguished Air

Foster Graham stopped me that morning to say greetings and it struck me that he looked more rested, or less used, than he had a month back, when I last saw him. He explained by saying that he’d been in the country for two weeks. “That’s the longest rest period I can stand now. Vacations are real work for me,” he said, and his remark gave me a sense of how the ever narrowing circle of his activities was closing in upon him as he pursued excitement, continually more recklessly indifferent, and always more jaded in his nonchalance.

There was brilliance in the sky above the Tiergarten this autumn day in Berlin, and brilliance in the orange and red coloring against the coldness of the sky. Naturally, I felt alert, with a tingle of extra vitality through my limbs. So, swinging along carelessly, I had not been watchful about encountering anybody. Had I thought, I would have known that a presence would be irksome to me at this moment of high feeling.

Foster had been but two weeks before this in Paris, and he was pleased with the new wardrobe he had bought there, careful this time to see that every garment had achichitouch. The trousers he wore were drawn in at the waist, and pleated there. The coat was padded smoothly at the shoulders, so that the descending line to the waist gave his figure a too obvious hourglass appearance. We had not spoken fifteen sentences to each other before Foster was camping, hands on hips, with a quick eye to notice every man who passed by.

“You’re apt to get picked up in a way you don’t want, and jugged,” I suggested to him, cheerfully, as conversation, for I was sure that he had gone in for the sort of thing he did go in for, long enough to know how to take care of himself.

“Tut, tut, this isn’t New York. It’s a shame for me to make an effort to get off with anybody here, because they’re all on their heels to start things themselves,” Foster informed me, and then also told me that he’d just been at the coiffeur’s, where he’d had his black hair waved. “I had them pluck my eyebrows too,” he said airily, and twirled his waxed mustache. “I wouldn’t look like this in Paris, but it goes down all right here.” As he talked he looked so completely a fashion journal figurette that his camping manner, copied from stage fairies in America, sat strangely upon him.

Neither of us was at ease, because beyond the first minute there was nothing for us to say to each other. It was only that we were both Americans in a foreign city that made us speak. I scarcely knew how to avoid his dinner invitation, but decided to plead blatantly another engagement, and let him suspect it as nothing but a social lie.

“You’re going to cut me, too, like old Timmons is, I take it,” Foster said then. “I suppose I’m getting too much for any of you purposeful beings. Tut, tut, how will I stand your New England disapproval. We are so moral.”

That was too much for me. After all of the yowl and yammer throughout America, amongst the groping intelligentsia, about the prudishness of the puritans, my Western soul rebelled. I could not be deemed New England. “Rot, Foster,” I explained, “we’ll have dinner together tomorrow night if you wish. I can’t ask you to come with me to the house I’m dining at tonight, because I know the people too slightly. About Timmons, you’re wrong. He’s scolding all the time about everybody, but he can’t disapprove of you violently, with his habits. It’s only that you are difficult when you camp around people who don’t understand. The manner is a damned cheap and flippant one anyway, if you ask me,” I concluded.

“Don’t tell me what he thinks,” Foster told me. “He does that well for himself. The other day he informed me that he would speak to me, but that that was as far as he could go, since I was too married to the pissoir. But my god, dearie, one must have a tea engagement now and then.”

“Yes, that. He also commented the other day on the way Ruth drank too freely—her copulating with whatever bottle she can get hold of, he called it—but you are certainly used to his irritations and aversions, aren’t you? One does get fed up on too much of any one aspect of existence.”

Foster, having started existence with some kind of sensibility, whatever had happened to it by this time, laughed nervously, as he attempted to be less facetious. “I know I’m a bore. But I can’t go back to America, and I knew five years back I couldn’t paint. What in hell? This is Berlin.... I suppose you’ve been working a good deal....”

“Not too much,” I answered Foster, as I wondered what he might do with his existence that made him like it better. “I’m just heading for Der Sturm, to see what new has been hung in the exhibition rooms there. Do you want to come along? Some of the paintings are apt to be as frenzied as you are, and it’ll pass away an hour.”

“Goodness me, Marjorie, I just love art. I love art,” Foster minced, unable to be direct for over a moment. “Will there be some pretty pictures of naked boys? I just love art. It’s too exquisite. So glad you asked me along.”

He did not come, however, to my relief, and I did not urge him. Not five minutes after I had left him I encountered Carrol Timmons, who was admiring a perfumery bottle display with a great air of connoisseurship. The aspect of his elderly aunt-like visage did not particularly please me, as I wanted the morning to myself, and was in no mood to be amused by his deliberate gaiety, or his continual halts to survey things in shop windows, but he was going in the same direction as I was so we fell into step. When I informed him that I had seen Foster, he said: “O yes, Foster. Tiresome boy. I’m so glad it is you I ran into. When you first spoke I was afraid it might be some of the awful rats who have come to Berlin because of the low exchange. Just too tiresome most of them are. I just feel as if I would have to give up seeing people altogether. And with this after-war atmosphere, and poverty amongst the few really likable Germans one knows. It’s all too tragic, I suppose, but I just can’t feel any further about that sort of thing. People will starve to death; people will die; or kill themselves, or drink themselves to death. Now Foster has, or had, an air—real distinction—but life has become just too much one thing for him. It’s more than enough having one’s friends, let alone acquaintances whom one accepts only because of worldliness, forever thrusting their awful and limited realities in one’s face. Foster can be a nice thing, when he isn’t drunk or in love, or both, but such times are too rare. And when there are such lovely window displays to see in the shops I can’t be bothered by people who bore me. But I suppose the natives can’t buy. How they must hate us foreigners. Of course they know me—from before the war.” Carrol conversed on, from irritation to complacency, back to irritation, and all the while his grey gaze appeared to be trying to pry into the world’s secrecies.

Agreeing that Foster could be less tiresome, I excused him, saying, “Of course he doesn’t at all matter, not even to himself. He simply has to exhaust time as he can produce nothing, and he’s probably despondent at his very inability to keep himself amused.”

Carrol snorted. “My god, yes. I understand his futility, and might be sorry for him in a way if he only kept some distinction as a personal presence. But one can’t go on forever being decent to him, and Ruth, with their worn-out, useless ideas. Always taking, taking, taking. Never giving anything. They just must live out their degenerate cycles. I don’t see Ruth now, and when she dares come into a cafe where I am, I hardly look at her. I told her I was through with her, and you know me. She asks me repeatedly to come to tea, in the hope, I think, of having me back, but I tried twice and she was so stinking drunk both times with the cheapest kind of degenerates about her— lizards, cats, whatever they were, not men anyway.... Foster seems to feel it very keenly that I’ve stopped with him, too,” Carrol talked on, saying the last with a satisfied air. It crossed my mind to be rudely frank for a moment and suggest to Carrol that he wasn’t one of the world’s givers, either, but instead I answered him:

“Poor old Ruth. It isn’t her fault. There never was a way out for her, crippled up as she is. I remember in one of her enlightened moments she designated herself as a sentimentalist with the soul of a drunkard. With her at least it’s just a terror of being alone. She must be batty in her belfry, and I know she has hallucinations that may come from d.t.’s, or might be just craziness. I’d just as soon miss viewing both her and Foster, Ruth particularly, when she is theosophical, or mystical.” Within a minute or so after saying this I escaped from Carrol, saying I had an engagement elsewhere, and when free, discreetly forbore going to Der Sturm galleries, or to the American Express, where Ruth might be calling for her mail. The clear day had probably brought them all out. Now away from anyone I knew, and from the various pent-up and frustrated qualities they made me too keenly aware of in their presence, I felt exhilarated, liking the assurance of physical well-being which the crisp air gave me.

I was successful about having the day to myself until five o’clock in the afternoon, when in a glowing mood I drifted into the Hotel Adlon, after having lunched with an entire bottle of golden moselle wine, capped with cafe and two liqueurs. I’d decided I might as well have a cocktail or two, have dinner, more wine, and then take what the night offered me in the way of diversion: a show; a dance-hall visit; or a cabaret, perhaps. No sooner had I entered the Adlon than a voice spoke my name enthusiastically, and I turned to see Rudge Kepler, a cartoonist, who was in Berlin seeing what he could pick up fromSimplicissimus.After leaving London, he informed me, he’d picked up with a pretty English girl who was travelling with him now. His great hulk swayed as he flung his arms about, and gesticulated with his hands in a large attempt to express his delight at seeing me. His greetings were always hearty, inclusive, and said as to an auditorium.

“Well, well, old timer. This is luck. Me and Goldie here were just looking for somebody to take us sight seeing, and I’ll bet you know all the fast places to go to. Meet my friend, Goldie. This boy always knows all the swell places. He smells them out. Let’s order some drinks while we talk things over,” Kepler boomed on, gustily. I was glad to see him, though aware that his excess of loose vitality and enthusiasm was wearing at times; but my mood was not a critical one. He was full of plans to get out new folios, to start new comic magazines, to take a trip around the world meeting “great men” and “getting to the bottom of things.” Goldie, the young lady with him, simply had no opportunity to explain how bored she was with existence; and Kepler had no ability whatever to understand boredom. It was to him a contemptible thing, a sign of weak bodies and weak minds; it did not have in it the quality of gusto, and virility, and strength, that caused him to make great swooping gestures in the air attempting to explain his admiration for whatever new “great men” he’d discovered; Dutch or Flemish masters generally. When I informed him that Carrol Timmons was in town he exclaimed breezily: “Ain’t that fine? Good old Carrol. The last time I saw him he’d just bought a new overcoat, and ties, and cigarette cases. He was just that grand, man dear”—Kepler leaped into mimicry—”there are so many beautiful young things in the world”—and Kepler halted, for a moment wondering if he should be flippant—”but good old Carrol, we won’t talk about his little eccentricities, will we? You know the last time I saw him he didn’t seem any the less bitter at moments than always, in spite of Europe. A friend of his told me the doctors said there was nothing the matter with him. That he was simply a hypochondriac and suffered from a lack of vitality. But then you know old Carrol, and I’ll bet he’s hating Berlin like he always did New York.”

Naturally I had dinner with Goldie and Kepler, and of course it was a good dinner with plenty of wine, because the re-meeting, the drink, and the sense of a needed fling-over after two months of quiet living, made me a person of great gestures too. There were cocktails;pate de foie,three bottles of wine, pheasant, Russian eggs, pastry, coffee, and afterwards severalfinesto round out the meal. By the time this was finished it was nine-thirty. In our mood, of course, we had to step out and see a little life. As there was only Goldie for feminine companionship and as she did not care for dancing and as none of us liked champagne, we voted against the gold-digging dance places, and decided to look over the queer cafes. At any rate by now, with Kepler and Goldie, and illuminated with wine and liquor, I was bravely ready to encounter Carrol, Foster, Ruth, or anybody else that Berlin nightlife had to offer. Kepler was eager too to have a look at what under-world life in Berlin could show him. I was only afraid that it wouldn’t come up to his expectations for wildness, though it wasn’t probable we’d stay sober enough to notice much anyway. Inside of half an hour we were seated at the Germania Palast, which was rather a show hangout, for men mainly. We felt sure that people some one of the three of us knew would drift in: from England, France, Scandinavia, Italy, or America.

Rudge Kepler was disposed to be resentful when we first struck the Palast; not because he had a combative nature, but because having drunk a little more than he carried ail-consciously, he believed he needed to resent approaches to keep his dignity; for no sooner had we entered the long narrow cafe and progressed to a table at the back of the room, than shrieks, yodels, and cat-calls began to greet our ears. Some of them may have been aimed at our party.

“Whoops, dearie, I see you,” sounded a falsetto voice, faking feminine tones. “Sisters Adlon are with us.” The speaker, I noticed, was a man who had dined at a table near ours when we were at the Hotel Adlon. His manner at this moment was much different from what it had been then, when he was accompanied by two respectable-looking elderly ladies. As he shrieked out the barman noticed him, and immediately sent a pile of tin plates crashing to the floor, while laughter and cries came from all over the room. Within a minute the man from the Adlon was at the bar, ordering champagne to be served to all who would drink it. “I’ll show these boys that us Americans aren’t tight with money,” he said with exhibitionistic generosity.

A few minutes later, as I had thought likely, Foster Graham came into the cafe, and passed our table to say good evening. He informed us that the man from the Adlon was a person from San Francisco, who had been involved in a grave scandal there, and who now lived on the continent in as abandoned a manner as possible. “He has three automobiles, and all the bitches in Berlin try to keep in with him. He’s as much of a nut as they make them,” Foster informed us.

After introducing Foster to Kepler, I suggested that we’d better get out, unless Kepler wanted to quiet down and take the place for what it was. Foster told Kepler too: “You have to take things as they come if you want to stay, because this place is protected by the police. The chief of police in Berlin is as queer as they make them himself. Anyway you needn’t worry, they recognize that you’re the B.M. stuff and just want to get a rise out of you. Don’t be unkind to the poor things.” So, warned to take all that happened humorously, Kepler became expansively good-natured and joked the various fairies about the room. He then ordered several rounds of drinks at our table, and began soon to relate a variety of fairy stories which he had heard while in the army, or about the sailors’ training camp at Pelham Bay, New York, during the war.

While we were there an elderly fairy, well known to various psychoanalysts in Germany, came into the place. This night he was dressed as a blond-haired doll, and his fat old body looked in its doll’s dress much like that of a barnstorming burlesque soubrette grown a generation or so too old for the part she played. All about the room at various tables were scattered the queer types of Berlin, many of them painted up, two or three in women’s clothes, and a great number of types who were not obvious; who might have been mere sightseers, except that Foster generally knew them by sight and swore they were male whores.

Kepler consented after his fourth cognac to d [...]