Reunification

The Berlin Wall fell and nylon-clad East Germans, brandishing their 200DM 'Welcome Money' came flooding over to look in the windows of innumerable porn shops on the Reeperbahn, their Trabi cars stinking out our orchestra pit in the Operettenhaus and even becoming my direct neighbours, but the big news of the autumn was that I was banging A, a colleague from Munich; very pretty, with pert breasts, but a pathological liar and closet lesbian. Complicated? You could say that. She had shagged her way through half the theatre before sharing my new flat adjacent to the Herbertstrasse, that famous brothel-rich thoroughfare in Hamburg's St. Pauli neighbourhood. Even while she was under my roof she invited men back ("They're just friends, you know") and proceeded to keep me awake, not through her noise, but through her attempted discretion. One day, though, I'd decided I'd had enough. I was out with Uli, my best friend to this day, and we decided to celebrate the night in style.. I linked up with Doro, a former flame and Good-Time George ("Kein Kind von Traurigkeit", as she so expertly put it), Uli headed off home with his choice and Doro and I went back to the Hopfenstrasse with evil intent and fire in our loins.

A was a notoriously light sleeper and Doro the loudest lover I'd ever known. Just the thought of paying back my tenant for the emotional torture of the previous three weeks made me hornier than ever before. Doro and I cracked open a bottle of white, took off our clothes and lit up a couple of cigarettes. It was 2am and there was damage to be done. We drank, smoked, sucked, licked and fucked our way through to dawn, Doro providing a soundtrack that would have done any of the Reeperbahn's noblest establishments proud. I heard A get up at about 9am, slamming doors and muttering about how inconsiderate people were. I saw her that afternoon, when she had the nerve to reproach me for my dreadful behaviour. She, of course, had never put a foot wrong, but so it is in the minds of the unbalanced. She moved out into her own place soon after, right after I'd had a visit from one of her other previous 'friends' who wanted to put the record straight with me i.e. dispel the lies he knew she'd told me about him. I'd known him considerably longer than I'd known her, and her face as we sat down over a beer after the show that night was a study.

A had tried to get me arrested. Every time I'd been to her place prior to her sharing my flat she'd attempted to get me blind drunk, knowing full well that the police always kept an eye out for WL - numberplates in Hamburg. I always resisted, recognising her man-hating games and this drove her mad. She never wanted a man to stay the night after fucking (I can't bring myself to say 'love-making', as it wasn't), so you'd shoot your load and have to leave. Yup, that's how romantic it was. She never wanted to expose her tits, either, but I managed to get around that. One day, a very obviously lesbian girlfriend came up from Munich to stay the week and it was clear she resented my existence. Confused times. Twenty years on, and A is still in Hamburg, probably still up to her strange games, even if Uli, who saw her a few years ago, said 'Sie sieht echt scheisse aus'. Back then she was a few years older than me, so she'll be in her mid-fifties, now. Time to grow up, I think. Against this salty backdrop, East Germany was quickly emptying and looking for work in red-light districts all over the Federal Republic, as it was still known. They still didn't know they'd been better off where they were.