Brick House

Ben Sherman and i-ref threw a party they called the Brick House at the tail end of that week. The appeal was transparent: free beer, free vodka, free shirts. The kind of math that gets Berlin’s chronically underemployed creative class in the door—evening, unlimited booze, something new to wear on the way out. I wasn’t above it.

The venue was the kind of anonymous Berlin space that could’ve been anything. Blank walls, industrial lighting, the sort of room that feels simultaneously sprawling and suffocating. But the crowd had that loose anticipatory energy you only get when alcohol is free and attention is thin. People I’d seen around a hundred times showed up, all of us for the same reason, all pretending the reason didn’t matter.

The night unfolded the way those nights do. You arrive, you drink, you talk to people you recognize but don’t know, the music does its work, the hours blur into each other. At some point you stop tracking time and you’re just someone moving through space. At some point you’re somebody else’s responsibility.

I woke up in Wenke’s bed with that specific dread of not remembering how I got there. For a while I was certain I’d been drunk enough to throw up on her pillow, which would’ve been a debt I’d never have paid off. She was completely unruffled about it, which meant either she has an uncommon amount of grace or she’d already mentally discarded that bed. Probably both.

The shirts were nice. That’s the strange thing about promotional parties—the actual merchandise ends up being the only tangible proof anything happened. Someone designed them, had them manufactured, shipped them to Berlin in boxes, handed them to people like me who barely noticed. The logistics of brand presence dissolving into drunk chaos is a funny thing to think about when you’re sober.

Wenke didn’t make much of a fuss about having a blackout drunk guy using her bed as a cot, which is what real kindness looks like. The kind you don’t know how to balance the scale on.