THE BLUES ARE A MOTHERFUCKER

by Joshua Rodriguez

There’s hardly any room to breathe in the crowded clubs downtown off Königstraße or on Theodorstraße, Proton or City Department; deafening hip hop music blaring, walls sticky with sweat, and the air pungent with the smell of spilled and flat drinks. Kids gyrate to music, eyes glassy and pupils dilated from molly or coke.  Grinding teeth, bulging eyes, and fathoms of energy. Acerbic tastes in the back of their throats and noses dripping like leaky faucets. People shiver outside, smoking cigarettes and unable to differentiate their breath from the cigarette smoke. Long lines at bathrooms or at the bar, everyone so close that you can feel them perspiring. Everyone surrendering themselves to this thing that’s happening, like a sacrament. Like communion. There’s something religious about communal imbibement. And watching it transpire is like watching a goddamn silent film, because you can’t hear a word when the music’s turned up that loud.

But we avoid that. We’ve extricated ourselves from that milieu. We prefer dives in Vaihingen or Leinfelden. We prefer to investigate the minutiae of our misery in bars with nostalgic 80s music and old stoic patrons, faces red, bloated, and saggy like they stopped melting halfway through.  Patrons with hard compacted beer guts or emaciated wiry frames that don’t say much, but just sit on bar stools like fixtures or occupy booths and stare off into the distance with a yellow boozy gauze over their eyes. But after a few drinks, that’s when they come out of their shell.

They stare into the prison break of their past and into the firestorm of their future, and they keep the drinks coming under warm and orange lights, because they are in on the big secret of it all: we are all curators of whatever sadness or turmoil inevitably afflicts us. It’s imbedded in our fuckin’ bones.

We birth our blues and try to abandon them like bastard children. But they always come back to us. The blues are a motherfucker, I’ll tell you what.

We sit at wooden tables, dimpled from use and dappled with light, and an ashtray is positioned in the center, and we all smoke around it so that it becomes like centrifuge. Here, in Germany, we can smoke indoors. Back home, we’re the self-proclaimed land of the free, but we know where freedom really resides.

Lights hang low with iridescent stained glass lampshades; they hang low like that apple in Eden, the first of countless failed utopias. We never learn our lesson, and that’s what makes humans so fuckin’ fundamentally beautiful. Endearing, even.

Time and death can barely keep us down, and the blues are tricky to navigate, but goddamit we try. And we drink to that. Every night, we drink to that.

Lights hang from rusted metal upholstery, and we hit our heads when we stand too fast, but we just laugh it off as the lamp swings and casts light across the bar and into corners usually neglected and untouched by its fragile, consecrating glow. The walls are wood-paneled with framed pictures hung on them, and the bell above the door jingles sporadically, jingling like a sleigh bell, when the door opens and the occasional customer enters.

There’s an exchange of a knowing nod as they go to order their drinks, and then go play the slots in the dark corner, drinking beer and chain-smoking cigarettes.

Because we all must be compensated for the crucible this life has put us through. We think so, anyway, and that’s the only thing that gets us out of bed sometimes: that maybe today’s the day that shit starts reversing. We’re waiting for the day fate stops reneging on whatever cosmic or karmic arrangement we assume we’ve been fucked out of.

And if you wait around long enough, when the bill starts adding up, the conversation gets so maudlin that it’s funny to think about when the thick fog of the hangover breaks a little. All it takes is a little booze, and the momentum of the blues, and the gears start turning, and we kick the damn thing through, and then it all comes out. The viscera of what it is that’s really eating at us gets spread across the table, and everyone picks at it like vultures.

And I get up to excuse myself so that I can take a piss.

“You broke the seal,” someone says.

“Now you’ll be getting up every ten minutes,” another person says.

“Don’t let him take a book in there or we won’t see him for hours.”

I laugh and say, “yeah, yeah, yeah,” and go to the bathroom.

The tiles in the restroom are old and blemished, white on the wall and black on the ground, and the mirror is cracked. It’s cold because the windows are open, and the stalls look dank and decrepit. I open a door to a separate room with nothing but urinals along the wall opposite of the door. There are no partitions, and two men snort lines of coke in the corner by a broken window. They watch me as I walk in and start pissing in the urinal, and eventually they offer me some, but I decline–they don’t elicit feelings of trust. They wave the white rock in my face like it was a white flag, and I shake my head and say, “nein, danke.” I wash my hands, and return to the table.

“I saw a camp of refugees,” I say. “There’s one by my house.”

“I don’t trust them,” someone says.

“They seem nice enough,” I say. ”I met some recently. They invited me over for food.”

“That’s their angle, man,” someone else says.

“You know the Quran says they can kill people,” another person says.

“The bible says the same thing,” I offer.

“No, it don’t.”

“Yeah it does,” I say.

“Yeah, maybe the one that people wrote. But I read the original bible that God and Jesus wrote, and it don’t say that.”

“What?” I ask incredulously.

“I’ll take you down to read it some time,” he says. “It doesn’t say that.”

“Yeah, and they’re just taking money and doing nothing,” someone else says.

“They need help,” is all I can think to say, my mind clouded and the world muffled from beer and shots of tequila silver. “And we should help them.”

“That attitude gonna get us all killed,” someone says finally, and there’s a murmur of assent that breaks my wino-fuckin’-heart.

And for a minute it gets hard to determine if we’re talking about us or them. Or if there’s even a damn difference. They’re talking about refugees like hicks talk about Mexicans.

Most of us order drinks in a hybrid of German and English because no one is here to stay permanently. That’s the nature of our relationship with this nation—tentative at best.

The bartender approaches our table.

“Hefe-Weizen, please?” someone says, his voice suggesting he’s asking if it’s right more than he’s asking for the beer.

“Me, too, a Hefe-Weizen,” the next person says.

We all order similarly, though the occasional bitte is interspersed. The opaque and golden brew is brought to the table, and the foamy head froths over as we raise it and make eye contact as we touch the bases of our glasses against each others’ to avoid several years of bad sex. The drinking culture is the only aspect of German culture we have no problem appropriating. And the beer goes down smooth. Damn smooth.

And at the end of the night, we get the check, and we divide it in broken German and broken English amongst ourselves, and we tip him a few euro. Because things are different here. We stumble out into the night. The falling snow makes it feel like we’re walking into static. We hear trains screeching and pulling out of the station.

Some go for a döner kebap, and go home. Me and my lady are a part of the latter. They dap us up and stumble off into the distance, beneath bulbs emanating a sallow glow, clutching beers and being loud and obnoxious, beneath the moon gaping in the sky like an astonished mouth. But we love them for it. God bless the U.S. of A.

And we walk down into the underpass and up onto our train’s platform, passed the clunky ticket machine and the newly installed vending machine with bright lights reminiscent of a hospital. We sit and wait, her head on my shoulder, and that meaning the world somehow, smoking cigarettes and drinking the beers we bought to go. Like at a fast food joint.

That’s real freedom, ain’t it?

I guess out here we do more existing than we do living. Time works different. The current is augmented and we adjust accordingly. Acquiring and expending time however it works best. We choose to live in limbo. A vicarious, damn near parasitic relationship with the U.S. government. Expatriates. Self-imposed exile. Et cetera, et-fuckin’-cetera.

Those are just things we tell ourselves so it’s not so damn repugnant. Because it’s a conscious thing we’re doing. Back home, it’s a short fall down and a long way up. It’s like trying to hold the light trying to make it there. All anyone seems to do is flounder and sink further and further down into the abyss.

“You’re miserable,” my lady says on nights I sit up drinking two-euro bottles of wine I bought at Kaufland on the walk from work to the train station. “You’re just skin and bones and a drunken heart. Don’t you want to be something more?”

“What more is there?”

And this cycle perpetuates in our room, on the unmade bed and amongst the empty bottles, piles of books on tables and the desk, and amongst piles of dirty clothes. I use postcards as coasters on the desk cluttered with scratch paper and notes. My parents’ house hums with disappointment.

“You could do much more.”

“I feel like I can’t keep up with the way the world turns.”

And it goes on and on and on and on until we pass out drunk, holding each other, sometimes in tears

The only time my soul seems to lurch in my body is after a few drinks. Otherwise it’s just busy concaving.

There’s something wrong with me, but I don’t know what. And I can’t shake these blues, but I can shake a leg.

So I split.