Berlin Smells Like Cum
Berlin smells like cum and stardust, at least according to Hannah, who wouldn’t shut up about it all weekend. She, Caro, Basti, and I tore through the city starting Saturday morning, and everything felt amplified, like someone had cranked all the dials at once.
We started at Tacheles, wandered into the Christopher Street Day parade—all that sweating, half-naked debauchery—and then Hannah’s running joke about the city’s particular odor became the theme for everything that followed. That night Kings of Leon at the O2 Arena. We were stuck in the cheap seats at the absolute back of the venue, management couldn’t be bothered with proper screens, and somewhere around the third song my ass went completely numb, but it didn’t matter at all. When they hit Use Somebody
and Sex On Fire,
all of us were screaming those lines with every other Ed Hardy bro from the eastern suburbs. There’s something about a song that genuinely works that just bypasses all the logistics and the discomfort.
After that we went to White Trash, where some flashy boyband was playing—Valient Thorr—and the singer was completely unhinged on stage, everyone feeding off that energy. Somewhere in the chaos Basti’s hand got split open with a beer bottle. It might have been funny. It might have been tragic. Caro treated it like a disaster. I just remember the blood, the shock, and the absolute certainty that this was a story that would stick with all of us.
3 a.m. at the Charité and we’re both thoroughly drunk, we stole a wheelchair, we’re racing through corridors like we owned the place. The resident physicians looked like they were ready to throw us out, or call security, or both. Hannah and Caro kept saying that scars look good on men, which is something you only hear at dawn in a hospital when everyone’s three whiskeys deep.
They flew to Munich the next afternoon, apparently took the sun with them. The details came back fragmented—something about the U-Bahn, a rubber duck, Til Schweiger. Lots of photos, they kept saying there’d be a video. It was pointless and drunk and messy in exactly the way the best weekends are. Next time we’re tearing through Munich.