Dennis Humphrey
From: The Hainstraße O-Club: From the Autobiographies
of Ward Singer
Sachsenhousen
Sachsenhausen
turned out to be a suburb of Frankfurt, about twenty kilometers west southwest of
the Hainstraße O-Club. For the history and/or war buffs out there, this
Sachsenhausen was not the infamous concentration camp of WW II, which lay north
of Berlin. This Sachsenhausen lay just south of Frankfurt, and whatever other
purposes it might have served to the locals, it served as a hub for the
English-speaking drinking community of the greater Frankfurt area. Pete and
Greg hustled me over the cobblestones of streets lined with English, South
African, and Australian pubs, but all of these were passed by as they directed
me around a corner into a small plaza. I’d call it a square, but it was more of
a trapezoid. In the center of this trapezoid stood a defunct fountain topped by
a wrought iron equestrian statue that had rusted down to an emaciated and
pitted remnant that reminded me of a Picasso sculpture of Don Quixote. On the
far side of the trapezoid was the Irish Pub.
I
had never seen a bar as crowded as The Irish Pub. People in various states of
drunkenness were packed in like British soccer fans at a World Cup playoff. The
interior of the pub was dark in both lighting and color. A thick layer of
cigarette smoke extended from the ceiling to within about four feet of the damp
and grimy flagstone floor.
Pete
handed me an icy-cold pint glass of Guinness. A half-inch layer of light brown
foam topped the black-coffee colored liquid. Pete touched his finger to the
foam in his glass, and then pulled it away. The thick foam peaked like
meringue.
“Yeah,
that’s the stuff,” he said. “You know it’s a good pour when you can write your
initial in the foam, and it stays.” He drew a P in his foam to show me.
I
drew a W in mine.
“Why’d
you draw an M?” Pete asked.
I
thought about making a wisecrack, but I reasoned that it was rather early in
our relationship for me to risk offending him. Did I mention he played rugby? I
attempted to turn the glass around to show him that the letter in my foam was a
W, but, of course, the glass simply
turned around the liquid within it, leaving him with an M and me with a W no
matter how many times I turned the glass. I decided I wasn’t so smart myself.
Note: FYI
Years
later, when telling this anecdote to some friends in a college bar, I would try
to reenact the scene in which I wrote my initial in the foam of a glass of Guinness.
To my utter astonishment, I found that the initial and the foam in which it was
written turned with the glass instead of remaining stationary. I was at a loss
to explain it, but I have since hypothesized that there must be some difference
in the composition of the Guinness that is distributed in America, which would
also explain why American Guinness gives me such a ripping hangover, when the
Guinness I had in Germany never had any such effect on my constitution. I have
since limited my intake of Guinness until I can find out what is going on.
About
the time I gave up turning Pete’s M
into my W, Pete looked over my
shoulder at something behind me. “Hey, no way!” he said. “Greg actually got us
a table.”
We
shuffled our way through the densely-packed crowd to where Greg, who was
standing on a barstool to compensate for his short stature, was waving his arm
to call us over to one of the round, freestanding tables. When he saw he had
our attention, he ceased waving and began dancing, still on the barstool, as
Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” began to play.
“Yeah!”
Pete said as he climbed atop another barstool to join Greg in his dance. Never
one to be left behind, I clambered up onto a third stool and began to dance and
sing along.
“Do
you remember when
we
used to sing,
sha-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-tee-da?
“Hey!”
a waitress shouted as she tugged at the sleeve of my shirt.
“Just like that,” I sang down to her,
grinning through the warm flush in my face as the Guinness began to make my
nose feel numb. The stern look on her face made me stop singing, though I
continued to dance and grin down at her.
“The
boss says no dancing on the barstools.”
“But
why?”
“They’re
not strong enough. Either get down on the floor, or get up on the table.”
I
shrugged and stepped up onto the table. Pete and Greg, who had apparently not
heard the waitress’s discussion with me, cheered and rushed to join me on the
table, the top of which was a three-foot diameter circle. The arrival of a
stocky soccer player and an even larger rugby player on the surface of the
table left little room for me to regain my balance after they collided with me
on their way up. Preferring not to trust the drunken mob on the floor below to
catch me as I fell, I took action to keep myself from falling. Each of the
tables in the pub had a lantern-shaped hanging light fixture dangling above it,
each of them, that is, except for the one on which we were standing. The only
remnant of that lantern was a length of bare, three-strand cable, from which I
presumed the lamp had formerly dangled. Feeling myself beginning to topple, I
reached for the wire.
I
can only surmise that the table itself provided at least partial insulation
from the ground, because instead of being electrocuted outright, I was only
treated to a throbbing pain in my hand and arm as I discovered that the cable
was not in fact a support cable for the former lantern but the electrical wire
that had powered it.
The
odd thing about electrical shock, to me, anyway, is that the pain in it is not
as disturbing as the discomfort caused by what feels like the invasion of the
body by an alien power. This is especially true of alternating current. It
feels alive as it pulses, at fifty cycles per second in Germany as opposed to
the sixty cycles per second of American power, through the electrolytic tissues
of the body, causing the electrochemical commands to the muscles to become
hopelessly garbled. Since I was already dancing when I grabbed the wire, the
resulting convulsions were simply interpreted by Greg and Pete as inventive
technique, and it was several seconds after I detached myself from the wire
before I could articulate what had happened.
“Don’t
grab that wire!” I shouted to Greg.
“What
wire?”
“That
wire.”
He
grabbed the wire.
“Whoa!”
he said.
“I
told you not to grab it.”
He
shrugged and shouted to Pete, “Hey Pete, don’t grab that wire!”
“What
wire?” Pete said.
“That
wire.”
Pete
grabbed the wire.
“Whoa!”
Over
the next hour this process was repeated by three DoD schoolteachers, five
British tourists, and a drunken old Irishman who claimed once to have beaten
single-handedly the entire Spanish national soccer team in a fistfight. However,
it was what happened next that would really turn out to be significant.
Greg
grabbed the wire again and grabbed Pete by the arm, conducting the electrical
current from his body into Pete’s. Pete then grabbed my arm, conducting the
current into me, and the pulsing feeling of an alien entity throbbed through me
again, stronger, as though passing through three bodies had somehow amplified
the power. There was a pop and the smell of ozone, and I was plunged into inky,
viscous darkness.
Next,
out of the immobilizing blackness, I became aware of the mottled red glow of an
extremely bright light as seen through closed eyelids. Afraid of what such
intensity would do to my poor retinas, I opened my eyes only the tiniest
fraction of a squint.
The
sun is immense. I see it far above the plant stem to which my six green legs
cling. All around me and above me mill the huge black ants, centaur-like in
their dragon world, toiling under the eye of the soldier ant that looms over
all of the soft green bodies that line the plant stem as far as I can see. The
worker ants stroke me with their antennae, stimulating me with electrical
pulses that hold me immobile, milking me of honeydew as I suck vital nutrients
from the plant through my mouthparts. Sucking, being milked. Sucking, being
milked. Next, a disturbance. A red soldier ant comes, locks in combat with the
black soldier ant. More red ants come, try to carry some of us away with them.
The black workers join the battle. I scurry away on legs not built for speed. I
lose my grip on the stem. I am falling, into the shadow of a black and purple
ladybug.
Next
the sun has become a hexagonal cluster of bright round lights. A face appears
before mine. It is Obie. He begins pulling wires from the antennae protruding
from the smooth green shell of my head. He reconnects the wires in a different
configuration.
“I
can’t get you out of here,” he says. “Not now, but this should help.”
I
still cannot move or speak.
“I have to go
now,” Obie says. “Remember, don’t let them get to you too.” He goes. Moments
later a figure in a white lab coat and green surgical scrubs enters the room
from behind me and checks some monitors. I cannot see his face until he turns
and fixes me with huge, black, segmented eyes.
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