It was a beautiful afternoon yet my friend, Harry1, wanted to strangle me. He was sitting across from me at a long wooden table at a biergarten, muttering under his breath, “I hate you so much,” which felt a bit dramatic! All I told him was that he should wear lederhosen to the neighborhood Oktoberfest, not that he must. I did not force him to wiggle his massive shoulders and heavy hips into skin-tight leather trousers. I only suggested that it would help him get into the spirit of the season, the season being: getting drunk with me, and finding a beautiful guy for him to sleep with. But unfortunately, we were the only two people at the local brewery wearing Bavarian folk outfits, so it was neither sexy nor endearing, but simply; embarrassing.
“This sucks dude. I look terrible,” he told me.
“I think you look excellent. Look at your pretty little flower. You’re such a pretty boy.” I pointed at an edelweiss on his lapel, and he slapped my hand away. When I become president of the Communist States of America, I will force all American men to wear flowers either on their shirts or tucked delicately behind their ears. We will all be so much better off. Just you wait.
“I better not know anyone here,” he said as he looked around the patio. He huffed, and groaned, but I think my gentle friend doth protest too much! If you press hard enough, I think you’ll find that most men want to be shown off, as if they are prized trophies or babies to be ooo’d and cooo’d over. The issue was that nobody at our brewery was having a good enough time to notice my friend. So he was being ignored, like a beautiful misunderstood belle at a very mediocre southern ball.
I felt quite guilty, actually. I had promised Harry that Oktoberfest would be fun, but the patio had all the excitement of a chaperoned school dance where no one could grind against each other. In a word; it sucked. My head had been filled with visions of men in skintight short-shorts and women in flowy dirndls balancing massive steins of pilsner in their hands. But instead the scene was depressingly American: elder-millennial men with IPA bellies, dissatisfied-looking Midwest brunettes in their northface fleeces, and grubby children already completely lobotomized by screentime. It was all so joyless and sexless. It makes me angry. What’s the point of living in this dying empire if you can’t drink and dance and be merry for a single goddamn second?
“I’m sorry, Harry. My ancestors would be very disappointed with this Oktoberfest.”
“I think they’d be more disappointed about the fact that you’re having a beer with a Jew.”
I laughed involuntarily. “Yes! Now that’s the spirit!”
I had invited Harry to go out drinking because he needed a break. He’s the kind of person who seems to always be carrying an invisible load of weight, and it’s evident in his sagging eye-bags. But he stubbornly refuses to let anyone help him, especially me. He has a do-gooder nonprofit job that he got into terrible student-debt over. But he seems miserable! And when he’s not hunched at his computer, he’s bouncing around between protests, community organizing shindigs, and endless meetings where him and his comrade’s self-flagellate about how much they don’t accomplish politically. He is ‘doing the work’, but that’s all he seems to do.
As long as I’ve known him, he has never had a romantic partner. He told me at the brewery that it’s not his priority. “Right now,” he told me, “My focus is on ~the work~.” I rolled my eyes. He seems to believe that getting laid is somehow counterrevolutionary. I should probably remind him that even Leon Trotsky had sex, but it’s frankly not an image that I want to dwell on.
“But I’m just so busy,” he said to me from across the table. “Even if I wanted a boyfriend, I’d barely have any time for him.” He talked about men as if they were dogs that needed to be annoyingly walked and fed at night. Which; fair.
“Besides,” he paused and finished his beer, “I’m just not in a good enough place right now.”
“I don’t think anyone is in a good enough place,” I said.
“Sure. But — it’s a bit irresponsible to date when you’re not emotionally available, right?”
I stayed silent and sipped my beer.
“I’d probably just be wasting his time. And I’d be wasting my time, too. Nobody needs that.”
“You’re overthinking everything, because you are allergic to being happy. Nobody knows anything! Go out there and try to get railed. I don’t want any part of your Socialism if we can’t have mediocre and boring sex during it.”
I caught the eye of the waiter and waved them over. Even though I loved Harry, he was a bit of a broken record, stuck on the same section of therapeutic-speak bullshit over and over again. It made me mad, too, because I knew that he did not believe in a word of it. Like pretty much all men, he was just pretending. Unfortunately, the only way that I knew how to get him to the next bit was by making him drink. It was depressing to think about this too much. But it must be done, because I could read Harry like a book. Yes, it was absolutely a noble thing that I was doing by ordering another round of Bitburger. The two large steins I ordered was an act of friendship! Nothing else — no selfishness whatsoever.
But God, the beer looked so delicious. I always toy around with sobriety – like a cat nearly pushing something off of a ledge. But then I see a glassware stein of lager sparkling in the autumn sunshine and think; ‘fuck this, I only live once, and I am going to drink.’ And then I drink. It’s very simple.
“What are we toasting to, Harry,” I said as I pushed the beer towards him.
“To being alive in the stupidest country on Earth.”
I smiled and drank.
Even though I know that Harry is right about this stupid country, I couldn’t help but feel a tad romantic about our surroundings. Above us the afternoon sunlight filtered through the red and yellow trees. Bees buzzed around a garden of fading trillium. It was a perfect postcard of autumn; something very beautiful, but dying quickly. Soon the flowers would wilt and the biergarten would be closed for winter. I find it impossible to eloquently describe the verklempt that hits me in these moments. They are some of the few moments of warm bliss that I still regularly feel.
But Harry and I were not having a good time. The fact of that hit me squarely. I closed my eyes and tried to feel the sun on my face, but it did nothing for me. Increasingly I feel impenetrable and cold, like a slab of marble left out in the snow. This coldness, and this inability to feel adequately warmed by anything, has spread to nearly every single part of my life. My American friends will hear this and say; go to therapy, get medicated, try to workout, test a new diet. And I will say: tried, tried, tried, tried.
Part of why I love Harry is that we both agree that life is inherently miserable. At heart he is still, as he said to me once, “An old-world Jew.” I don’t know what this means, but I like it. Whatever Harry means, he knows better than to believe in the American fantasy of endless sunshine and rainbows. I am not so different than him. At heart, I am simply a German Catholic with a terrible taste for cakes and beer, who just so happens to believe that everyone is a sinner and that the devil is in charge of America. These sound like insane beliefs, but they make total sense to us. For thousands of years, our ancestors have crept through the world and imparted these little lessons for their ancestors, like crumbs along Hansel and Gretel’s trail. That is how life is supposed to be; you are raised by old people, and they tell you things that older people told them, and then you learn from it and form opinions of your own.
But the unique issue here is that America, in its incredible evil, tells all of its children that history doesn’t exist. Each individual is born solely as an individual, and they can only listen to themselves; screw the parents, and screw the ancestors. And so each individual is a blank slate that conveniently tumbles into a culture of American consumerism. And in this world, the most important thing that a person can purchase is happiness. Happiness is each person’s birthright, even when life in America makes happiness materially impossible. And so Americans strive for something that they cannot possibly achieve, since they have been removed from the essential things, such as family and history, that make a good and truly happy life possible. And then these Americans feel miserable their whole lives, and slowly kill themselves through distractions because they know that they can’t achieve real happiness. Enter: screens. Enter: the beers in front of Harry and I.
At the biergarten, Harry brought up one of the big protests he had been too recently. It was one of thousands of rallies across the country on the same day. It was one of those events where a bunch of people stand around, hold clever signs, politely clap, walk around, and then leave. During the rally, Harry told me, our local congresswoman stood up and spoke. Her whole speech entailed her reading aloud the Declaration of Independence. When she got to the part about ‘the pursuit of happiness’, supposedly the crowd went wild. Some kindly-looking grandma standing near Harry really lost her mind. She went woo-woo-woo and kind of danced — or at least as much as her hips could handle. After the speeches were all over, the lady drifted from the crowd and moved towards a group of police officers, where she reached out and shook each of their hands while ‘thanking them for their service.’
“Can you just imagine that,” he said to me. “Like — you’re at a protest where the message is that the president is a fascist destroying civil society, but the biggest applause line is about being happy? And then you go over to the cops and shake their hands? It makes no sense.”
“Nothing makes sense anymore.”
“It is a completely unserious country.”
“Yes.” I waved over the waiter again and ordered a round of Hacker-Pschorr. By Gott, we were going to have a good time!
“It drives me insane.”
“You can’t let it drive you crazy,” I replied. The waiter returned with the beers.
“No,” he paused and looked at me. “Some craziness is good. It’s the {burp} well-adjusted people that I hate. I despise them. I’m afraid of anyone who can be happy right now. Happiness has never accomplished anything.”
“Well then. What does work?”
I regretted my response instantly. Harry was grinning and rearing his brain for what I could tell would be a detailed lecture on political tactics. I was going to agree with everything he said, of course, but I still didn’t want to hear it. If I had wanted to be talked at by a Marxist man, I would have gone to a DSA meeting. I had left Brooklyn deliberately to escape that type of guy.
“The protests are broken, dude,” he said to me. “They aren’t accomplishing anything. All they are is a pep rally. People go to them, they {burp} cheer and stand around, and then they go home and feel better about themselves for a few minutes until they turn on their phones and watch a video of some random brown guy pulled off the street.”
“I know,” I said.
“And then people feel miserable and powerless. That’s why these actions are awful. People go to them expecting to do something. But then nothing happens. What we are essentially doing is telling people that nothing they do matters, that they have no power that can be harnessed or grown, and that all they can do to resist fascism is to stand in the rain with their cardboard signs.”
“I don’t disagree.” A breeze came over the biergarten, and I suddenly felt cold and far-away.
“Everything’s fucked, man. Fucked!” He yelped a little, and then shrunk into himself. I smiled a little sadly when he spoke like this. Supposedly I had given him just enough beer that he was worked up, which I had wanted. But it was so much beer that he could no longer clearly articulate his beliefs. He probably had a pretty idea that had completely failed when it crossed his lips. In a very nasty cynical moment I thought that it was not unlike Harry’s utopian Communism: a beautiful idea that, when put in practice, completely fell apart.
I looked around at the patio. The sky was purple-blue, and the yard was draped in strands of yellow lights. The benches were full of people tightly packed together. Their voices were louder, and the octave of the laughter was pitched higher but slightly out of tune. The breeze rustled the strands of lights. I was reminded of something, and spoke to Harry.
“Do you {hiccup} wanna hear something,” I said.
“Sure. Fine.”
“I’ve told you about my great grandma, right?”
“The German one.”
“Yes.” I nodded. “The German one. She had been raised in Germany but came here as a kid. Spoke English and was completely Americanized. She never spoke German, I guess. But when she was dying in Michigan, something happened to her {hiccup} brain. She started speaking German again. She was convinced that she was a child again in Bavaria. She was an eighty-year-old woman in the Midwest, laying in her hospice bed, crying out ‘Opa, Opa.’ She apparently thought her grandpa from Germany was there.”
“That’s so sad,” Harry said. He was interested in me again.
“I mean, just think about that. You’ve lived a long and interesting life, and have put this terrible past behind you. But then in the last moments of your life, your brain by default tosses you back into 1930s Germany.”
“Sounds shitty,” Harry said.
“Yes,” I laughed. “Terrible!”
“Something like that happened with one of my friends.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Well, her grandfather. My friend’s grandfather had been a survivor. After the liberation, they emigrated to the U.S. and lived a completely boring life. You know what I mean,” he paused, looking into his stein. “Anyways, the grandfather starts to slip into dementia. The guy is suddenly completely paranoid. Hiding watches in drawers, locking his bedroom door, screaming these terrible night terrors. In the last days of his life, he was completely distant. Screaming and locked in his room. Like he wasn’t even in Miami anymore.”
“Where did they think he was?”
“Oh, they knew. They knew right away. He was in the camp. He was back in Treblinka.”
“Jesus.” I shuddered, and rubbed my hands together. The breeze was picking up. The waiter came by and Harry ordered for us this round. I decided in that moment that I loved the waiter and wanted him to marry my friend. That way Harry could have phenomenal sex with a member of the proletariat, and I would have free beer on tap forever. That was how my brain worked after my fifth round. I was finally doing Socialism.
“Do you think we’re haunted,” Harry asked me. I was shocked! It was like he could read my mind!
“Yes! I think everyone is haunted,” I replied.
“I like that theory.”
“I do too. It makes me feel warm.”
“Warm?”
“Yes, warm!” The beer came; hallelujah! “I know ghosts are supposedly cold. But I like the idea of them floating about and quietly watching our lives. It makes me happy to think that we’re not alone.”
“Hmm.” Harry mulled the thought. “So, they’re like guardian angels?”
“Yes, kind of. Except that they don’t have much power. And they’re not necessarily good. But they still stick around, because they have to. And they let you know when they are happy. Whenever you feel warm in strange moments, those are satisfied ghosts.”
“And unhappy ghosts are... cold.”
“Bingo.” I was very happy with how quickly Harry was following along. I felt very warm.
“It’s a very pretty idea,” Harry said. “Pretty, and stupid. But you are Catholic after all.”
“Who do you think your ghosts are,” I asked, trying not to be offended.
“Hmmm.” He paused and looked away. I could tell he was actually thinking, which I admired. He is one of the last Americans who thinks before he speaks. “I don’t think I have any ghosts. Maybe Jews don’t get any. Or maybe they’re just there, but they aren’t warm or cold. They don’t want to tip the scales.”
“Hmm.”
“Like — they had their shot at life. But now that they’re dead, they don’t want to interfere. Because they respect the living. They know what a gift life is. And they know that we have to figure it out for ourselves.”
Harry’s family once lived in Vienna. They had been a small thread in a rich quilt of Jewish cultural life at the beginning of the 20th century. His ancestors were doctors, painters, teachers, writers. They went to coffeehouses, patronized the opera, and likely discussed beautiful people such as Freud, Marx, Emma Goldman, and Rosa Luxembourg. They believed in the future and built enriching gardens that their children could harvest from. But then the Nazis came with the Anschluss. The beautiful Aryan Von Trapp’s sung and danced their way out of Austria while the Jews, Harry’s family among them, were trapped in the city. Their homes and possessions were liquidated. Gone were Mahler and Klimt. “And the rest is history,” Harry said as he limply waved his hand around. What he means is that most of them were sent to camps. His branch of the family survived. Most of the others simply disappeared. “Poof.”
“Poof,” I said.
“And after all of this, you made me wear lederhosen!”
“And you like it!”
“Yes! I like it! It’s kitschy and terrible, but I like it!” He had a fire in his big, brown eyes. “And your ghosts! Your dumb ghosts. Who are they?”
“Germans.” I smiled.
“And what are these Germans saying now?”
“I think they’re telling us to drink more beer.”
We are six beers deep and then suddenly I am almost counting in German; sechs, sieben, acht, on and on. Finally, Oktoberfest! It is here! We crossed an invisible threshold. We are having fun! Someone is playing awful German polka on a speaker at the biergarten. Christ, it’s terrible! Harry and I are laughing at it; “You people are stupid! Stupid music,” he says to me. I’m sorry; it can’t be all Beethoven!
A whole group of people dressed in horrendous lederhosen walks onto the patio. “Ayyyyy, more of us! More of us!” Harry hollers at the group, waving them over. They have terribly perfect American smiles, and they happily come bounding over to us like a posse of golden retrievers looking to be pet. One of the men, a very Aryan-looking blonde-haired type, slides next to Harry. They are immediately in cahoots; smiles, whispers, mischievous giggles. I just know that they will later have disappointing sex, of which I will have to hear many details about. Next to me is a woman in a very low-cut dirndl. Her hair is blonde brunette, done up in two long braids that look like ropes connected to large church bells. She has loudly slid into me so that her legs ‘accidentally’ bump against my things. She looks like if Julie Andrews had grown up in Georgia and voted for Marjorie Taylor Greene. ‘Uh oh’, I think to myself. But after eight beers, that thought turned into me publicly asking: “Do you know how to yodel?”
“Hmmmm.” She squinted her eyes. “I’m not sure. Would you like to find out later?”
Oh mein Gott. The waiter comes by and Maria Von Trapp orders me the largest beer in the world. She talks at me. She has the most California voice I have ever heard before. I have never heard a Nazi with vocal fry in the flesh.
“He, uh, tells me you read a lot,” she says, yelling into my ear.
“Books schmooks. I prefer to burn them.”
“What do you LIKE to read,” she asks, either not hearing me or choosing to ignore.
“Mein Kampf.”
“Hmmm, I haven’t HEARD of that one,” she yells again. “What’s it about?”
I tell her that it’s about the President of the United States.
“I’ll read it then. I honestly don’t really read anymore, you know. Sometimes audiobooks. But mostly I listen to, uh, podcasts.”
“Which ones?” I was preparing my whole body for her answer. I was praying, silently. Please God, let it be the podcast I’m imagining.
She got closer to me. She put her frigid hands on my lederhosen-clad thighs. “I, um. I really like this podcast called RED SCARE!”
CRASH! At another table someone had knocked a stein onto the bricks. Someone nearby shouted “Opa! Opa!” I followed the voice: It was Harry! His white undershirt was nearly fully unbuttoned. His wiry black chest hair was spilling out. It was like a small storm cloud swirling above his nipples.
“Wrong la-la-language, Harry!” I waved my finger at him. “Say it in the Ge-ge-german.” My head was spinning. I could not string a meaningful thought together. I was completely lost.
“Oh! You know German,” the fraulein asked.
“Eh. No. Yes. Kinda.”
“Well. Then how do you say it?”
“Say what? Uhh.”
“The Opah-opah thing he said?”
“Oh.” I paused. I was ready for this to be over. I wanted to kill myself. “Sieg Heil.”
“Sieg… Heil,” she said it very slowly, as if it was a new spice she was testing on her lips. “Yes. Sieg Heil! That sounds kind of nice to say.”
“I’m sure it does,” I replied.
“You have very pretty eyes,” she said. Suddenly I felt terrible. I was being an asshole for no reason. I had looked at a perfectly charming blonde woman who listened to Red Scare and thought; ‘you are a Nazi’, even though that was completely unfair! I was evil and wrong and part of the problem. Maybe she could even be my wife.
“Thank you,” I said, abashedly. “I like what you did with your pigtails.”
“Thanks.” She leaned closer and whispered into my ear. “I like when men grab and pull on them.”
Yodel-eh-eeee-ooooh and there I go. I temporarily leave my body and float above the biergarten. The Aryan’s hands are pressed into the small of Harry’s back. Harry’s eyes are glassy and distant. But at the bench I am completely frozen. Dimes-Square Eva Braun is trying to make moves on me, but I don’t even register her hands. I am not even a man anymore, but instead some kind of theremin; rigid, but registering a disturbingly wobbly sound as she tries to move her hands around my shoulders. I don’t know what sounds I am registering. Something like the frantic boop-boop-boop of a telegraph calling out ‘S.O.S.’, or perhaps the static recording of an old speech, full of yelling, and cheering, and the two words that the woman just learned.
My mind is like a slideshow that clicks forwards and back, full of moments that I can’t escape. I am frozen, spellbound, and forced to rewatch.
Age 6. I am told that I had family in the war. I now get toy planes and tanks because I am obsessed with this war, and all wars. I must know everything. One day I sit in front of the TV. On one channel is a war documentary. I watch it. There are battles and very loud planes called stukas strafing women and children in Warsaw. In one scene, a young girl cries over the body of her dead sister. They were in a field picking potatoes. In another scene, a tractor clears a pile of corpses from a concentration camp. The bucket dips under the pile, eases forward, and hundreds of bodies tumble off of the metal edge of the bucket, as if they are sacks of potatoes. CLICK.
Age 10 or 11. I am reading a book about the Third Reich. I learn that after the war was over, and once the extermination camps were discovered, the Allies forced the local Germans to visit the camps. The innocent ‘Good Germans’ were forced to stand over the ditches full of the dead, and then bury the corpses one by one. They wailed and cried. I nodded and thought ‘yes, good. Good.’ And from here comes my whole political worldview. CLICK.
Early teenage years. I start to learn our family’s American war stories. One man drives a tank across the Rhine River. Another bombs German railways and cities from the sky. A third is in a French house when a panzer blasts through the walls. His friends are killed. He is shipped by train to a slave labor camp in Germany. He is starved during the winter of 1944. He is fed bread made mostly of sawdust. He is so traumatized by the cold that he heats his home over eighty-degrees Fahrenheit back in the Midwest. I am told that he sold his guns. It turns out this is a lie: his guns were taken from him. CLICK.
Age 24-25. I meet Harry. He tells me about his distant family being killed at Dachau. What happened to the family that was murdered there? Who knows. Shot in a ditch, or incinerated in the crematoria. I wonder if my great grandfather, the one that was a slave-labor prisoner, saw the train car that carried Harry’s family. Did they wave? Maybe they knew that they would be somehow reunited in eight decades. CLICK.
Age 28. I go to Germany for the first time. I am there with my wonderful ex. I feel strangely protective of her, because she is Jewish — even though I know she is better prepared to handle this than me, and unlike me she has already seen Germany. We walk through Munich. She jokes and says something like; ‘Can we not only sightsee Nazi things?’ Rats: I was prepared to walk through the Hofbräuhaus and point at the swastika on the ceiling. It’s true: there is a swastika on the ceiling of the very famous Hofbräuhaus. In the 20s the Nazis had organized and rallied in the brewery, and by the 30s it had become a pilgrimage for mediocre Nazis to revel in the glory of der Führer. The brewery had painted a swastika on the ceiling in the form of flowing white-flags which united in the famous symbol. But when the war was over and all the Nazis fled to Argentina and America, the Hofbräuhaus simply painted over a few inches of the painting so that the flags united in a dull blob. With discerning eyes you can still see the shape of the Nazi cross behind the white paint. I wanted to tell my ex; ‘isn’t this a fitting metaphor for history, that all evil deeds simply get painted over? Isn’t German and American history just one giant ceiling in the Hofbräuhaus?’ CLICK.
Age 28, one day later. My ex and I are sitting outside at Munich’s Oktoberfest. The weather is warm, calm, and we are both outside, sipping our radlers and smiling. “This is actually so nice,” she says. We are both looking at a table where a family of three generations are all sitting together. The toddlers are twirling about the table, singing and going la-la-la. I have a big and sudden feeling, which I never told her, which goes something like; ‘I feel so at peace here. I feel so connected and at home. I look at everyone’s faces and feel like I could know them. They look like my grandparents, my parents, and the people in old black and white photographs that we keep in the albums.’ I want to cry. I have the weird thought of; ‘Is this in my blood? Am I, as an ancestral German, bestowed with certain predilections? Is that why I like Goethe, and Bach, and the taste of raspberry radler in the autumn sun?’ But no, I can’t say that. I don’t even really believe it. It’s an evil German trick. Evil, evil. CLICK.
Age 28, the same day, a couple hours later. I am sitting in a large beer-tent with my ex. It is essentially only tourists here. In the center of the beerhall is a raised bandstand. There is a quintet of depressed looking German men wearing lederhosen. One is balancing a tuba in his lap. Another is holding a clarinet to his lips. “Uh oh. Oompah music,” I warn out loud. “It’s like Klezmer, but shitty.” And then the band plays, and I will never forget it. They play a completely harmless sounding polka song. It is a song that is on every single Oktoberfest playlist you will ever find. But because of my history, I had known it from somewhere else. I had first heard the polka song in a grainy black and white German film reel. In it the tubas and horns had gone ‘bromp, bromp‘ while a procession of troops goosestepped in front of the Führer. In the reel, Hitler stands rigidly with his arm at the 45-degree salute. And below him an army band marches by, carrying tubas, playing the Oktoberfest song, bromp-bromp-bromp. At the beerhall I felt a sudden chill. I lied and said that I needed to use the restroom. I locked myself in a stall and started shaking. CLICK.
Age 31. I am with my family in a warm house. All we can talk about is politics. ‘My God, my God, isn’t it terrible what he is doing,’ someone says to me. “Yes,” I say defeatedly, “It is terrible.” The person tells me that she is learning German. “German,” I ask, perplexed. She says that, well; we might have to move back to Germany! It’s so terrible here! We can barely afford our prescriptions! The economy is going to collapse! What are we supposed to do — just roll over and die!? And I don’t have an answer. Well. I do have an answer. And it is the same thing that Harry believes needs to happen. But I can’t say it out loud. Even though I live in the freest country on Earth… I still can’t say it. CLICK.
But now I am back at the biergarten. MAGA Julie-Andrews is marching her fingers across my thigh. I have been mercifully returned to my body. I get an idea. I have a very clear sense of what must happen. I pluck her hand from my thigh and hold her wrist loosely. “Will you do me a favor?”
“What’s in it for me,” she asked.
“Anything. Anything. I just need you to get my friend to dance.”
“How am I supposed to do that? He’s gay,” she whispered, as if it was some great secret.
“This is what you do,” I leaned in and whispered in her ear. “Go over there by the speakers. Stomp your heels. Say something out loud. Yodel! Make noise! Get someone to dance with you!” I held out my pinky in front of her face. “Can you please do that for me?”
She looked at me a bit strangely. But I could tell that she was intrigued. It was something real, and not rehearsed. It would make her briefly the center of the world.
“Okay, fine.” She grabbed my pinky, kissed my cheek, and then stepped away towards the side of the biergarten. She cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled out,
“I need to fucking dance with someone!”
I looked down the bench and could see dozens of pale faces staring up. I felt a flutter of warmth. I admired her, even though I couldn’t trust her. She looked around wildly. “Well!?” And I looked over at Harry and nodded at him. I mouthed some silent words over to him. Harry shrugged and stood up. Another guy to my left stood up too. People started congregating and moving over towards the music, including Harry. His Aryan Beaux stood up alongside him. The man almost nervously grabbed at Harry’s hand, as if he could suddenly lose him after such an easy catch. I watched the fingers intertwine. I looked up as they walked away. The woman started dancing. Someone else started dancing too. There was awful and terrible German polka playing. Before long the blonde woman was pressed against another man. And Harry was holding the Aryan and laughing wildly, both of their heads tilted far back.
I felt an immense sense of... I don’t know right German word. Relief, I guess? Everything felt comfortable, and predictable. My friend would have dull sad-sex that he would quickly forget in the morning. I would never, mercifully, see the woman again. In a few days it would be like none of this had ever happened. For a split second, there was a terrible omen in the sky. I shivered and heard of all of these dead voices saying Achtung! Achtung! Briefly I believed that it was the end of the world. But I have blotted it out. I stand up on the ladder and paint over the evil symbol. I slather it in white, and now no one can see it. There! And then I will go home and quickly push it out of my mind for all of October. And then I will drink, and write, and joke about it with friends. Ha-ha-ha, oh Harry — classic Harry to sleep with a blue-eyed Aryan. It will be completely happy and fun. I will be warm, and then frighteningly cold, but I will push it aside. It’s the weather that’s changing. Yes, that’s it. It’s just a light breeze.
Not his actual name — >:)