Those Days and Those Nights: ‘Coat Check Boy’ Berlin Edition
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Rob Fernweh reflects on life as a coat check boy at Berlin’s sleazy chic gay bar.
When I was twenty-nine I escaped life as a coat check boy by moving in with a green-eyed Spanish painter and stumbling into a job teaching English for a small school in Berlin. When I was twenty-eight I ran away from a job tending bar in Philadelphia for a summer in Berlin I’d not planned, just booked, maybe even just on a whim. I lived my life like that in those days, when it was still possible to be free.
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Years before, in college, a friend I’d met and who’d introduced himself in German told me he saw me in Berlin, and in the end I heeded that calling once a certain creeping existential terror began encroaching on my then purposeless life. He’d caught me studying the language furtively in the back of a café and made the mistake of believing this rookie could then speak it. One August day while riding my bike and dwelling on my fading youth I began mentally constructing a vacation I saw myself taking, though it was hard because I’d never flown anywhere far away alone before, only with family, and I began to think about the kind of places where I might want to go on dark chill autumn nights, maybe places like New York, certainly places that were affordable, and then I remembered my friend’s invocation and I booked a package on one of those sites that proliferated and competed in outlandish television spots that only served to annoy. Berlin. Ten days and nine nights.
**
Photo above: Stefan Widua
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There are certain kinetics to coat checks, a certain shyness or hesitancy too, almost as if we strip off more than layers, almost as if we’re startled to see ourselves in those moments as others see us.
Friday night at Lab, short for Lab-O-ratory, a filthy hole full of men seeking out something or someone in the dark, door closes at ten, or maybe it was midnight, last chance to transition from whatever gray face you bore through the day into whatever manifestation you wanted to believe that you could present to the night world. They’d hand you a trash bag at the door along with a ticket. That ticket bore your number and after you put your day self into the bag a coat check boy would scrawl that number on your left arm with a marker. He’d smirk and the ink was cold.
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The coat check is a nexus of eager anticipation and nauseating anxiety. It is the transit station to the rest of your night. It is the hurdle to the next things, the things you anticipate or hope to anticipate. The coat check boys are a mystery in Berlin and even after you’ve left the occupation you wonder about their lives, filling in the details arrogantly based off the memories of your own life doing the same: the dawn shift drink, the sleepy train ride home with the incongruity of businessmen speculating about the day’s news, the kind of spaces boys like us inhabit, scant of furniture, witness to maybe love or at the least lust, maybe some plants but unlikely, not enough sunlight for any of the inhabitants, and assuredly drawn curtains, the fugue of awakening at dusk and having breakfast while the sun sets. Do they go to school? Are they perhaps students? Can they afford to keep lovers? I remember having hardly any time for lovers.
**
How does a twenty-eight-year old American fleeing from the demise of his youth, the incipience of age and decay, and the sheer emptiness of late stage life become a six-euro-an-hour coat check boy in the coolest city in the world? Easy. He just shows up.
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That’s what my friend always said, one of the ones I made over the counter: all you have to do is show up. He must possess, therefore, cheekbones like mine and an aura hovering somewhere between vampire and house cat and Go Go Boy. Such that one night he might be sitting at the bar pining for his German vampire lover only for the bartender to ask him if he’d like a job. And he would, he’d love a job, because he’s fallen in love with the city and a coat check boy might just be the beginning of a life here. So he shows up.
I always called the bar the Island of the Lotus Eaters. This appellation is strange considering the island had a peculiar digital clock above its front door that starkly declared the lateness of the hour, and yet the men kept munching lotuses. I saw men seduced to surrender too much of their time, and before long it was too late and they’d wasted nearly their entire vacation at this historic dark room bar in the Schöneberg section of the city. I hadn’t done the same during my initial seduction by the city, I think I tasted the lotuses and understood, but for whatever reason when I’d first come to Berlin I’d done it all. So I tried to warn them away, telling them about other parties at other bars and clubs, but often to no avail, because the next night they’d be back, arriving anytime between eleven and two and leaving at dawn. Eventually you just have to let men munch their lotuses.
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The movements of a skilled coat check boy function like a metronome but he still sees things, sees enough. Take the proffered item or items, calculate the cost. Slide the jacket onto a hanger and break the claim ticket in two, spearing the one half to the hanger and handing the other to the patron in exchange for an euro. Scrunch the jackets down along the line, making space, praying for more on busy nights, hook the hanger and turn for the next mark. Some will see you and others won’t; it depends on how many lotuses they’ve already digested and how many more they’re eagerly anticipating in that moment. The ones that do see you? Sometimes they’re the ones you’d rather wouldn’t.
Though I know the science on smoking I enjoyed it in those days. I was pretty shameless about it, blowing smoke in the men’s faces as they paid or on their way out. Not many of them tipped so I didn’t care. I made six-euro an hour. I didn’t care. I would be something bigger one day. A novelist, esteemed, I would be. Boys would check my coat. This was just the beginning, and besides, it was cool. It had cachet.
We’d do shots. Some friends of the owner congregated at the front bar and would call me over. We’d do shots and I’d order a chaser, take it back to the coat check, take slugs of beer in between marks. Patrons befriended me or tried. The bar had regulars. I remember some of these people and others only their outline. They’d crowd me at the coat check and offer me immigration advice or advice on finding better employment. I’d nod and listen, racked with worries, probably not helped by my private belief that none of these shades could help me. In this arena of fortune I was on my own.
Photo above: Levin
The bar played porn on monitors. One of them haunted me, right in my line of sight next to the kino machine where the truly desperate leaned into their morbidity and played for hours, hoping for a win. This was just another form of lotus. I’d never become that desperately sick of pornography. I couldn’t turn away at the same time, entranced, I suppose, because I didn’t know where else to rest my eyes. I’d lean against the counter and smoke and pretend to be cool, my cat’s tail twitching, flicking my eyes about nervously.
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There was a secret to the Island of the Lotus Eaters: they played the same music pretty much all of the time. The Lotus Eaters couldn’t know this because they were too engaged. Periodically a porn emergency would erupt, great shouting, harried panic as one film would end and the screens would go blank and the lie might be exposed, the munching might cease, and at times I’d have to run down to the video store that never closed and grab some tapes and run them back to save the night. Pacified, people returned to their private endeavors and I’d recede back into the caverns of my own mind, plotting my future with very little time to spare.
What else does a coat check boy on the other side of the world do? Roust rowdies and the too-stoned. At the end of the night I had to collate the bottles and sort them into their respective cases, to ship back to the distributor, so that the bar might receive its bottle deposit. I had to collect any glasses and return them to the bar. As the sun rose at four or 4:30 I had to sweep the butts off the walk, into the gutter, where I guess that they belonged. I had to go around and wake those who had fallen asleep in various corners of the bar, say hey, it’s dawn, the spell is broken, you’re free to return to whatever home a person who naps in bars returns to. I had to balance my till and take my pay. I’d sit at the bar and have a beer, then take the train home and wrap an old tank top around my head to block out the light, then close the curtains and sleep. I passed into dreams I knew I had only because I could feel their presence heavy after I’d awake. I knew what they were. I dreamt of a normal life, unmediated by a broken temporal rhythm. I dreamt of a life where I did not awaken in a fugue at three or four and wonder briefly who I was and where I was, and whether it was dawn or dusk. I dreamt of a life where I did not walk to work at ten and peer in the lit aquarium windows. Walking through Berlin as an outsider is like walking through an aquarium or maybe past a department store. You peer in at the imagined lives or the maybe enviable lives, especially when your own feels so empty it’s cold. You imagine others with warm lovers and their own nights.
Above: the line to get in to Lab-Oratory, Berlin.
**
One night in late Spring a young man walked through the bar door. He checked nothing but I sensed him take everything. He walked past me, then he walked past me again. He had green or blue eyes and sandy hair, tousled and curly. I wondered what words, what language, might spill out of his parted bee-stung lips. Later, when he came back I asked him as he retrieved his bag if he wanted to spend any time with me.
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When we met a week later at another, cleaner bar I discovered that he was Spanish, that his eyes were green, and that he was a student. I did not discover that he was a talented painter until later, when he’d taken me home and showed me. Later, when I’d moved in with him he told me that he’d sat and watched me work that night, intrigued, because to his mind I did not belong. He’d looked at me as aberrant in that place. Maybe that was the reason I’d never let the place fully seduce me, if it had ever come close, before I’d become entirely disenchanted, the cool factor stripped away and laid bare as mere novelty. Though to this day I do not know what my lover did see, because he too is now just another wisp or figment of my past, though with far more haunting pull than that bar or almost anything else can possess.
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I quit the bar later, after I’d fallen in love, so I guess love made me do it. I’d already found a job when one walked through the door one night. A group of English teachers came in and discovered my aberrance and marveled over it too, and then they offered to help me find work. A week or two later I had a new job. I guess I would have had to leave in the end, but I felt no end of exasperation and didn’t start teaching for a month, so I could have continued herding Lotus Eaters. I just didn’t want to. I wanted to rise early and walk to the park and massage nouns into sentences and then spend the afternoon slowly murdering verbs and darlings and culling adjectives. And then I wanted to walk home to my green-eyed youth from Córdoba. One night he butterflied a chicken while explaining to me how his grandmother had taught him the skill because she’d needed it in Franco’s Spain. One night we ate stolen watermelon he’d walked away with from a grocer. He offered to steal me a bike to match his own purloined ride.
Years later I worked one night at that bar, maybe just for sport, before the world changed too irrevocably as it did. Ghosts haunted me. They were everywhere. Some of them were men whom I remembered but who did not remember me. Some of them were remembered denizens of the Island who disappeared, maybe for good. One of them was a youth who I kept waiting to walk in the door, again, once again to save me and this time to save us both, as I had been unable to do. If the boy comes this time I won’t mess up, won’t implode us. I smoked cigarettes with rank insouciance. Luis wouldn’t have minded. He would have thought it funny, maybe that it marked me off as aberrant, even strange. But the boy never came.
Other nights that time in my life I came and watched the coat check boy. He seemed so expectable and yet so unique, as we all are. He did seem more comfortable with munching flowers. I wondered about his private life and I kept seeing shadowy rooms with bare floors, futons, empty refrigerators, items tossed aside in the quest for love, maybe, but at the least a quest for solitude or a quest for the cessation of solitude, depending on the character of the boy or the man, and what he is seeking in the night, what he seeks as he nears the end of that night.
For Luis
