no.10 “professional at work”
Today I woke up to a knock on my door, which has never happened before. I rolled around in bed and ignored the first knock, precisely because I had no idea what the sound was. By the second and third knock I realized I wasn’t in the most boring dream ever but somebody was actually knocking on the door to my room in our shared apartment. I rubbed my eyes and got up, opening the door to my blond roommate Stephanie. She was smiling apologetically and wearing white overalls spattered with paint.
„Did I wake you? Can you help me paint my room? I decided on ‚petrol.‘“
She pointed to the green-blue stains on her overall. The color wasn’t half bad so I decided to help her. Stephanie was studying product design and specialized on packaging and interior decoration so she had come up with something fancy for her room. She had mapped out the walls with masking tape that criss-crossed and formed rectangles and triangles of varying sizes. She would paint over the masking tape and when she’d remove it later there were perfect white lines randomly shaping a unique pattern on the wall. For me personally it was a little too Pinterest, but I had just painted my room apricot, so who was I to talk? Also I jumped at the bonding experience.
Stephanie and I were just about finished painting over the masking tape, when we heard a loud rattle from the kitchen. Then a loud clank and in the silence that followed a muffled „Fuck!“ Fuck indeed. The two of us had forgotten all about the human rescue cat we sheltered in our apartment and who left long strands of reddish brown hair all over the place: Our third roommate Peggy. Of course she didn’t need to be rescued at all; her mother and father were still together and were loving parents to Peggy, which made it even more annoying that she behaved like an orphan.
When Stephanie and I entered the kitchen, Peggy had her hands in her hair and a panicked expression. The washing machine was emitting faint clouds of smoke. Peggy had wanted to get some washing done while preparing a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. In the heat of preparing she didn’t notice she had dropped both a fork and the pepper mill from the kitchen counter into the drum and started the machine. Just seconds after, it stopped working.
Stephanie patted Peggy’s shoulder and softly told her to calm down, that it wasn’t that bad, which is what every decent person would do. I on the other hand, after dipping my finger in the drum and licking the tip of it, told her it was missing salt, which is what a fun person would do. As expected, Peggy hated that. In hindsight I might have smirked a little too hard.
I couldn’t help it, the jokes just didn’t stop that day. When the mechanic came to our apartment and knelt over the broken washing machine I read the company’s name on the back of his work jacket: KüchenGeräte Bauer. Or short: KGB, which is a pretty funny name to call your house appliances company, even if it wasn’t based in Dresden. Unfortunately the man from KGB was everything but joking when he told us the new parts for the washing machine plus the service fees would amount to approximately 200€, which at that time was a lot of money to me and far more than Stephanie, Peggy or I could spend. We told the guy to order the part, that we’d come up with a solution and that we sure hoped he hadn’t installed a bug or a wire in our kitchen because we had the means to find out. He didn’t laugh.
A few days passed, and we still hadn’t come up with a solution for our financial crisis induced by the washing machine incident. None of us were making any extra money, and Stephanie had even quit her job, for reasons of „creative differences“ with the professor she worked for. According to her, he „wasn’t thinking progressively“ when it came to flaps. She explained it to me by saying that working for him was like Zaha Hadid designing sausage carts in Central Park, a reference that went - you guessed it - right over my head.
On top of it all Peggy was acting like she had nothing to do with the whole thing. I wanted to discipline her by making her sell newspapers on the street and cutting her meals down to hot broth and stale pumpernickel, but Stephanie intervened and assured me that it was just a difficult phase Peggy was going through, that manifested itself in breaking things and being rebellious. I complained and asked her why it didn’t manifest itself in baking banana bread and being environmentally conscious, like with every other young person these days.
Regardless of the trouble with Peggy, there was still no cash coming in. I didn’t want to ask Mother for money, since she already made fun of me for not being able to live on my own, and Yannik putting cutlery in the washing machine sounded like something my family would come up with as a joke. I had to clear my head. So I went online and found a nice guy to meet up with.
Dirk Altmann was a short boyish man around thirty, with white-blond hair and a squirrel-like demeanor who right away invited me up to his hotel room, not far from where I lived. He said he was in town for business and offered me a small beer from the minibar. When I asked what he did for a living, I immediately regretted it. My question initiated a 40-minute rant about his job, which he apparently hated doing, but absolutely loved talking about.
Dirk was a salesman for heating elements and air vents, mostly to big tech firms, and he knew a lot more about them than just how to sell them. He knew how they were constructed, how they were installed, how they were maintained and cleaned, and he told me all about it, not just how heating elements were constructed, installed, maintained and cleaned, but also how air vents were constructed, installed, maintained and cleaned. He was convinced that you had to know the product inside out to be able to sell it. He told me that no one else in his field was as serious about heating elements as he was, and nobody had accumulated more knowledge on air vents than him. He even gave me his business card and, after taking in my thinly veiled bored expression, asked me, with a smirk much like the one I had when making the salt-joke earlier that day, if I felt any different about heating elements and air vents than before I had talked to him. I told him that I really didn’t. But I could tell he was a natural born salesman, because he talked me into doing something I had never done before and shouldn’t have done in the first place: I fucked him without a condom and came inside of him. Now, fucking a stranger without protection is a dumb thing to do. You don’t know this person, and he doesn’t know you. But Dirk Altmann convinced me to do it anyway. He was that good a salesman! But jokes aside, what I did was dangerous and stupid.
I’m sad to tell you that what happened next was even more dangerous, and a lot more stupid. During sex Dirk’s hyperactive energy somehow seemed to multiply, and a lot of things were happening at once and very fast and accompanied by even more talk. Imagine Sonic the Hedgehog in young Charlie Hunnam’s body with the speech pattern of the voice actors rattling off side effects at the end of drug commercials. But right after we came his whole body went limp and fell asleep like a baby. All the energy was gone in an instant.
To be fair, it was good sex, but I was still wide awake, and all the talk of installing air vents left me in want of adventure. I got up and put on my underpants, examining the hotel room for anything of interest. I peeked through the curtain to look down on the street. Kebap shops, students drinking beer, the usual. Then I turned around and there it was, resting on a stool on top of Dirk Altmann’s jeans. His wallet. Just out of curiosity, I looked inside. There were some business cards. And there were three 50€-bills. I smiled to no one. I wasn’t gonna do that. I put the wallet back and sat on the bed. Dirk started to snore. He looked like a stressed out baby, even when he was sleeping.
I dressed. I breathed in deeply. Then I stood up, walked over to the wallet and opened it again. I had one of these old timey cartoon moments, where miniature versions of the people in your life spin around your head and repeat their most important lines in an echo to guide you to make the right decision. First appeared the KGB man repeating: „…200 Euros - Euros - ros…“, then a vision of Peggy pulling her own hair and fuming, after that Stephanie mumbling „Petrol - Petrol - etrol…“ and the last subconscious appearance was Zaha Hadid munching on a Hot Dog, which really wasn’t helpful at all. I waved off all these ghosts, slapped myself and made a decision. I took one of the bills out of the wallet, left the hotel room and closed the door on the sleeping Dirk Altmann, professional at work, wondering if the 50 Euros I had just stolen from a stranger would be enough to pay for my share of the new washing machine.