Hamburg, a Super Soaker, and the Gap Between the Last Song and Morning
The night before, we’d destroyed our vocal cords at karaoke. The night after, we were in Hamburg, which felt like a natural progression. The crew: Nike, small and relentlessly energetic; Josh; the audio obsessive; two friends whose hair was in a permanent state of structural chaos; and me, who should probably have been sleeping. We got there by train, spent the journey working through increasingly deranged hypotheticals, arrived at the hotel, and immediately broke both the remote control and the hairdryer through means I prefer not to reconstruct.
Then mini-golf, which we played against the people traveling with The Toxic Avenger before he went on. The VIP contingent allegedly won the tournament. I maintain that we—the self-declared "Lägga Dörtschn," named with the kind of confidence that only arrives after several beers—were the moral victors regardless. Then sausages, more beer, and down the road to the venue.
Skrillex arrived with enough forward momentum to walk straight into a wall on his way in. This did not slow him down. Once he started playing, the room turned into something close to a collective convulsion—dubstep and drum machines and bass frequencies you feel in your sternum before your ears catch up. Sweat flew from people’s hair in arcs under the lights. The crowd heaved and contracted like something alive and not entirely friendly.
We lasted behind the barrier for about twenty minutes before throwing ourselves in. I came out the other side with bruises in places I hadn’t realized could bruise, covered in glitter I wouldn’t fully remove for several days, and in possession of what I estimated were seventeen new STDs. Somewhere in the mass, David, Nils, and Marian—Marian with those eyes that look like they’ve already processed something the rest of us haven’t gotten to yet—surfaced and rejoined the group.
Between the last song and the moment I found myself in a hotel corridor armed with a Super Soaker, chasing people I liked and some I didn’t, the footage goes missing. I know there was food at Erika’s Eck at some hour before dawn—Hamburg’s famously unglamorous round-the-clock diner, sausages under fluorescent light, the best thing you’ve ever eaten. I know Nike and I shared a shower at some point. In roughly that order.
One genuine regret: we had the opportunity to steal one of the obscene garden gnomes with the particularly detailed backsides, and we didn’t take it. Cowards, all of us.