Nine Bars and a Currywurst
The invite said "secret location." The address in parentheses said ewerk, Mauerstraße 78–80. This is how Berlin’s celebrity-adjacent event circuit works: everything is exclusive, nothing is actually secret, and somewhere between the ninth free drink and the currywurst station, you either decide you’ve made it or admit you’re just very good at sneaking in.
It was the European Music & Media Night, put on by Volkswagen, theoretically for the most important people in the most important industries. The dance floor confirmed this: minor soap actors, music managers in blazers that cost more than my rent, and the kind of influencer-adjacent model who’d been on a reality show once and carried that fact like a badge. I’d ended up there after the first night of the Berlin Festival left me feeling vaguely cheated, and I was still somewhere between buzzed and functional.
Wilson Gonzales Ochsenknecht—German actor, the kind of recognizable face you can’t quite place—turned out to be decent company. We talked about Snowbombing, where we’d both been earlier that year, and the conversation was warm enough that I didn’t feel like I was collecting anecdotes. Bonnie Strange talked about role models and friendships with a frankness I didn’t expect. The music managers were a different species. I discovered that if you drop the word "business" five times in a single sentence their eyes light up like pinball machines. Past a certain blood-alcohol level, everyone wanted to make you a star, regardless of whether you were a journalist, a musician, or the person cleaning the bathrooms at Universal.
The assembled crowd is what it always is at these things: lovable self-important people, all quietly fascinated by each other while pretending not to be. The semi-celebrities complained about other semi-celebrities. The music people trashed other music people. Everyone bonded over mockery of the guy who’d won a contest in some tabloid and has been calling his wife every ninety seconds to report celebrity sightings. That one from the jungle show, she’s right here at the bar—the one with the massive tits!
He means it as high praise. His wife Hannelore is probably thrilled.
By two in the morning, the crowd had pushed into a far-too-small side room and the place descended into cheerful chaos—glasses flying, people elbowing each other for warm bread rolls with red sauce, like something out of a wartime newsreel except everyone was wearing leather. The catering staff watched with the serene detachment of people who have seen every variety of famous person behave badly and find none of it interesting anymore.
At some point I’d had enough of half-naked, sweaty, cocaine-glazed soap actresses grinding against me—or rather, I’d had the precise right amount and knew it was time to leave before the balance tipped. I crowd-surfed back to my neon blue jacket, declined the goodie bag, and got out without signing anything for Pierre "I’m a music manager by passion, you’re my muse" Koslowski. The band that smuggled me in inside a guitar case, whose name I’ve already forgotten—I owe them one. Bruno the bouncer, to whom I gave a brief and extremely lascivious lick on the cheek and who thereafter asked me no further questions—God bless him.