Club Exclusive, night before check out, the majestic hotel, Barcelona.

tonight he was different. i could sense it right from the beginning. he opened the door, and smiled at me. "i am so very glad you are here you don´t know how glad i am that we do this, how much it means to me to have you around." i nodded. he continued "you have no idea it can be so hard to find a way to relax. i wonder how people do that, really relax. i can´t understand that a holiday works that way, do you like holidays, well you must, otherwise you would never have agreed to accompanying me all over the planet. i hate holidays i hate travelling i despise most of the people i have to deal with, making them happy giving them what they want, let the mergers take place at the costs that we never see back in the balance sheet of any bookkeeper as they are the costs of the quality of life"

he stopped in the middle of that sentence and looked at me. "you wanna do the story here, or shall we go to a bar, i feel like going to a bar, shall we have a drink at one of the bars in the street or just in the hotel?" i told him that i had seen enough of the streets, staying inside would suffice.

" let me put something casual on then, i don´t want to be overdressed next to you."
i didn't know how to take that last remark, was i underdressed, or did he just want to get rid of his suit? i waited, the door to the hallway was still opened, whilst he changed. there was a group of businessmen walking passed the room, they stared at me whilst passing.

R. had put on jeans and a t shirt and did no longer resemble the corporate image i had seen for so many times. he no longer was a much more grown up and smart man. i asked him how old he was. he said he was 42. that was 8 years older than me. i had a lot of friends who where that age. but none of them had flourishing businesses and travelled, hardly any of us had even a car.

we went to the bar, and i dared to ask him another question. i asked him how he had relaxed before he met me. "i hardly could, that was the point of hiring you. i would go back to these hotelrooms and just lock myself in, in my thoughts. or i would crunch numbers, look at files, and add all the numbers the companies gave me. just add every single digit they fed onto their paperwork. and see what would come out. or multiply or whatever. it worked, but not as good as you do. i like your life. you don´t take anything in consideration. you just react, you never act, you are one of the last true bohemians, you should have lived in the sixties, ah, no, if you had lived then, you probably would have died on an overdose, or worse, have survived it, and then would have to live with the consequences of that for the rest of your life." 

i took it in. i asked him in what time he rather had lived. "I live in exactly the right time. but enough about me now, tell me another one, you flowerpowerpuffgirl you."

i told him that i had been a punk-goth-garage girl, and no way a hippie, but that i had lived in a house with hippies.


it was dreadful. they were stoned all day, listening to frank Zappa and John Lennon and Yoko Ono who were also stoned and screamed that they wanted to be Eskimos in the deadly yellow snow.
the house had a ground floor, and two upper floors. the ground floor had been empty since forever. the hippies lived on the first floor, we, the punks lived in the attic. when the landlord kicked us out, he renamed the attic to a loft and could thus charge a six times higher rent for exactly the same space.
the hippies ate macrobiotic food cooked up for hours in a Römertopf. it smelled ghastly and i only tasted it once.

we punks only had money for instant soup and canned ravioli.

the kitchen was the only place our two worlds would occasionally collide, i tried to evade the hippies as much as i could, as they could be trusted to make some remark about my karma being affected by all the black i chose to wear.

there was one other common space: the bathroom. it was a place i tried to avoid entirely, nobody ever cleaned it. it smelled of piss and vomit. and it looked the same. there was no toilet paper, everyone was supposed to buy their own, take it with them, and then take it back to one´s room. but some of the tenants never bought any. it never struck my mind that i could clean the bathroom myself either, i must admit in hindsight.

i would try and go to the toilet in public places as much as i could, and also brush my teeth there. i would go by friends houses or ride my bike back to my parents´ to have a shower or a bath.

it was my big-hair period back then, i needed at least three hours to get my hair upright in exactly the correct fashion. first i washed my hair. then i back combed it. I heated the babyliss waffle iron, waffled my hair, and back combed it again. the most important thing was the hairspray though. in the beginning, when i still lived at home i tried old housewives stuff: egg whites, beer, soap. nothing worked, it smelled, and if it would rain the sediments would run into my eyes, and ruin my make up. then came a new product: gel. it was sold in transparent jars, and it was either fluorescent blue or yellow. it was a big step forward on the big hair scale, a true revolution. the hair became bigger.

Then one of our scene discovered an obsolete product: Wella Forte. hairspray. the can is best described as non-design: a black and white chequered background, green letters, and a red rose on it. but the forte truly was fabulous. there was no longer any excuse to have little big hair. in the hierarchy of this crowd, the bigger your hair was, the higher you moved up the ladder.  i remember one night, i think it was for a concert of "the birthday party" i had spent even more time on my looks than usual, and the rain just poured down incessantly. i took a garbagebag and put it over my hair, and rode my bike to the club. the closer i got to the venue, the more people i saw peddaling their way to the concert. it was a sea of bags. garbagebags for the big hair, normal shoppingbags sufficed for the little big hairdos.

the hippies in the house and i only spent one afternoon together in a semi peaceful manner, and this was what i told R:

club exclusive

and one day, oh, that was a sad day in a way. it must have been about one in the afternoon, early spring, but not a particularly nice and sunny day, more of the murky grey kind. a day that doesn't want to be remembered so it hides itself behind the clouds.

now imagine that colour grey on a woman's coat. and the same mousy hue, only with a slight touch of iridescent blue, for this womans hair. and the colour of her skin is just as ashen as her outfit and hairdo. she looks as if she herself was washed too long on too high a temperature.

and notice, from your bedroom window, as i did that afternoon, this woman walking to your door and ring the doorbell.

i went down and answered the door. The woman did not introduce herself. She said hello, and i helloed back. she started to delve deep into her handbag and took out a black and white photograph of a man.

she held it out to me with a very knowing look on her face, as if i got the picture just by looking at it.

at first i thought that she might be a member of some kind of religious cult, trying to get money off me or to get me to one of their salvatory meetings, so, i was ready to close the door on her.

but then she asked me a question. she asked me if i had seen the man. now, he was a man that you would never notice. bleak and completely identical to all the other office nestlers our city seemed to harbour in the million-fold. therefore: no, i had never seen him. she was not in the least deterred by this, and pointed at a Datsun that was parked five meters next-door. "that is his car" she said, as if that finally explained everything, i felt she became a bit impatient by my complete lack of understanding the ever so obvious.

"i know he is in there." she said. and then it started to dawn on me. although she was standing with her back to the building across the street, i realised.

we lived opposite to this brothel, called "club exclusive". nothing really exclusive about it, a sad place, with only the word "club" in neon letters. probably because the word "exclusive" was too expensive to have done in neon as well. the idea that anyone would ever want to have a party there, was a very sad notion. for the party in this place was over for a long long time.

i never saw any of the girls who worked there. however, i did always know whenever the owner was drunk. he would then play the same song over and over again. it was "if you could read my mind" by viola wills. and if he was in a really jolly mood he would sing along, the whole night long. but most of the time, the place seemed completely desolate, no business was their business as usual.

"he is in there, that is his car" the woman said again. and i had to assume that she was right. "hasn't come home last night, and that is his car." i asked her whether she had asked at the club itself. she shook her head, stared at me for a bit, waiting for more information. i just stared back, i did not know what to say anymore. the woman shrugged and said good-bye, and walked to our neighbour. she was calm, determined to find the assurance she didn't want to have.

i went upstairs, but i was just too curious to find out whether she would be able to confront her husband. I saw her take the picture out at four or five more homes, to no avail.

she stood there, on the sidewalk, holding the photograph in her hands.

all of a sudden her movements became a bit more agile, and rather determinedly she crossed the street. She held the picture in front of her, as if it was her shield of armour, and rang the bell of the club. The owner opened up, and tried to look surprised when she shoved the picture right in front of his eyes. he started to play dummy in a far too obvious way, the woman kept pointing at her husbands car, the owner just smiled demeaningly.

he then went back inside the club, shutting the door in her face. the woman shrugged again, turned around and kept walking from the club to our house for some time. Then she turned to the Datsun, with a briskness she had not shown before. at that moment i was sure she was going to wreck it up. but she did not. she put the photograph of her husband underneath the windshield wiper, and walked on to her bicycle, got on it, and rode away.

by now my hippie flatmates had joined me behind the window to watch the events, and we thought that this was the end of that afternoons entertainment. each of us made some comment about it and wanted to go back to our own rooms. just then, two houses next to Club Exclusive a door opened. the owner of the club stepped out, looked around, and gestured to the husband that the coast was clear. the husband ran to the car and drove off. he hadn´t even noticed his own picture, clinging to the windshield, that now accompanied him on his way home.