no.8 “lotion, lotion, lotion”
In the second month after moving into the shared flat in Dresden I woke up one Saturday morning to find a giant turd waiting for me in the toilet bowl. It was just sitting there, head tilted slightly upwards, staring at me. This wasn't the occasional stain or small miscellaneous drop of poop, I’m talking about a full dark-brown éclair-sized piece of shit. I know I didn’t put it there, and the two girls I lived with seemed too small in size to produce such a massive string of feces. But stranger things have happened, and it certainly hadn’t crawled back up the drain on its own. Also, there were no signs of toilet paper in or on the toilet - sometimes when you flush and it’s too big the pieces of toilet paper get tangled up or torn apart and swim around in the brownish water without direction. But none of that was evident, it was a clean, pure, untouched human turd, almost like the human it came from had sat down, pooped, and jumped right back off the seat without doing anything to him- or herself or the toilet. So now I had two choices. I could ring the alarm, wake up my roommates and call a household meeting to figure out this fecal mystery, or I could do none of the above and just flush it down where it belonged. Considering the already strained relationship with Stephanie, the blonde, and Peggy, the brunette, I decided to flush down my anger and uneasiness along with the turd itself and pulled the handle. Then I pulled it a second time because the first flush hadn’t been strong enough to carry the monster to its last resting place.
That night - unlike that morning’s turd - I couldn’t find any resting place in our apartment. Stephanie and Peggy had invited some friends over and were dancing in the kitchen to the Spice Girls, drinking cold punch made from cheap sparkling wine. There was a small window connecting my room to the kitchen, which was glued over with wallpaper but you could still hear every word they were saying in the other room. I roamed around my small cave, unable to concentrate and equally unwilling to join in their stupid fun. At one point I could hear them saying how weird I was and that I never took down the trash, which was true, but nonetheless hurtful to hear. Besides, I had swallowed my anger that morning in the turd situation, why couldn’t they do the same? Why did they have to voice it? To get out of the apartment and away from their judgmental comments I had to make plans for the night somehow. So of course I went online and found someone to date. He was what I came to call the Mickten-rotter.
Mickten is the part of Dresden where the whorehouses are. It’s not quite central but not really far off either. Rotter I call him simply because he disgusted me. But I’m jumping ahead.
When my date for the night opened the front door to his apartment the first thing that struck me was that he looked just like my best friend from kindergarten. As he led me into his small but very clean flat I asked the universe what it was trying to tell me with that. I looked up to the ceiling and imagined the correspondent responsible for me in the universe-world; a stoned-out-of-his-mind teenager flipping his dirty underwear at me whenever I turned to him for guidance. I pulled myself back to the material world and noticed that Mickten-rotter was living in an exceptionally small place. He slept, worked, cooked and lived all in one room. The washing machine was fenced off from the couch by a thin pale yellow curtain and the couch folded out into a bed that slept two, as he happily told me while preparing the obligatory glass of tap water. He motioned for me to sit down and said his favorite TV show was on, did I mind watching for a bit? It turned out to be the 214th season of Deutschland sucht den Superstar, the German equivalent of the British original Pop Idol, which, in the hands of trusty producers from Cologne and too many years in, had become so bright and trashy it was unbearable to watch. (First three seasons were of course television at its finest.)
The hour-long humiliation of Germany’s youth and unfolding of the nation’s rather dire musical state gave me a chance to quietly examine my date. From time to time I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye while he sat mesmerized by the screen. I noticed he was still pretty young, but the extreme tan he got on his face and neck made him appear years older. His skin was deep dark orange, like the color you might encounter on a dirty buoy.
I remembered the tanning trend well. Brother and Mother both had looked like that years ago. Their leather handbag faces deeply burned into my memory, I suddenly figured out how trends worked. It came upon me like lightning: Trends were set in suburban garages by the marvelous tightrope-walking people who were so genuinely weird and special they were too underground to be mainstream and too mainstream to be underground so that whatever they came up with was - no matter how distasteful - always original. These trends were quickly picked up by the shallow but hyper-successful distant friends of the tightropers living in garages and shown around the metropolitan areas and New York Cities of this world. A couple of years after that happened, small-town folk reading GQ or InStyle picked up on them and perfected the art of achieving a certain look in the cheapest way possible, since their middle-class jobs earned them shit but they still had enough pride to make it work. About five years after that the original trend that was set a decade ago arrived in the outer limits of Eastern German cities. Places so far off the map and economically so irrelevant that the semi-cycle of the idea ended there. The Eastern German Suburb is at the butt end of a very long one-way street. It’s where trends come to die.
And it’s where I had decided to spend my evening. When the program ended he turned to me, closed his eyes and with pursed lips moved his head closer to mine. At first I couldn’t figure out what was wrong about the kiss, it wasn’t exactly wet, it was slippery and tasted like vanilla mouthwash. I figured he must be a serious chapstick user. After I undressed him and put my arms around him on the couch I realized that wasn’t the only skin care product he was adamant about. His entire body from forehead to toe was covered in oily lotion. Seemed like his healthy buoy skin had to be maintained and pampered to stay orange and smooth as a newborn’s tush, just like one wanted it. To add to that he didn’t really do anything after making the first move. He sat there like a spineless sack waiting to be touched. I had a hard time holding on to any part of his body, and one time, as I tried to grab his shoulder, my hand slipped and hit myself in the face.
To be honest, I didn’t know why I kept going. I was nothing but disgusted. It wasn’t fair to myself and it certainly wasn’t fair to the poor man who for all I knew seemed to be having the slide of his life. But I kept going anyway. I didn’t pull away. I didn’t excuse myself. I didn’t leave. I went along with it. Which - needless to say - went pretty smoothly because of all the lotion.
On the way home I passed a bar called „The Thai Luck Oasis“ and the illuminated plastic palm tree in front of „Klax“ night club and rubbed my hands on my jeans where they left oily white stains. I looked down at them and got to thinking. I had done a lot of things that day I didn’t necessarily wanted to do, accepting and swallowing every unpleasantness just to make things work. Be it with my roommates, or with a warm body I didn’t find attractive. To smooth things out, I too was willing to take desperate measures. I pictured Future Yannik getting punched in the face and offering the puncher a fifty-dollar bill as an apology for standing in his way. That day riding home to my shared apartment I swore I wouldn’t live like that, and before flushing it down the next time a giant turd swam in my toilet bowl I would at least take a picture for evidence.