I turned 40 this year in Berlin. The trip was a present to myself. My little vacation was also special because my good friend, and long time crush, Dean Sameshima, was to have his first big opening in the city the night I arrived.
I met Dean about 8 years ago. A mutual friend introduced us, saying to me, “You’re both crazy, so I really think this could work.” Dean and I spent that summer getting drunk at his place and watching reruns of Sex and The City. The more we drank the less television we watched and the more Polaroids he took of me holding my dick. He jokingly told me that I’d be famous someday. We had fun. But things never really took off for us. Looking back on it now, it was obvious that we were both scared to death of dating the other. Of his reasons, I’m not quite certain, but mine was that I could see my being the George Dyer to his Francis Bacon — After years of booze, pills and rent boys, the police would find me dead in Paris, hunched over the toilet of our hotel room while Dean would be attending his retrospective at the Grand Palais.
After arriving at the airport and cabbing it to his flat in Kreuzberg, Dean buzzed me upstairs and met me at the door. “Hey! You finally made it!” We kissed and hugged and I got settled in. His apartment was littered with silk-screened images of what looked like vintage pictures of a gay guy cruising in various places around Los Angeles. And that’s just what it was. “Is this part of your show?” I asked. “Yeah.” He said. “It’s John Rechy, the guy who wrote City of Night. The stuff I did for this show is based on his second book, Numbers.” Numbers is a book about a guy who, mindful of his waning youth, goes on a quest to convince himself that he’s still desirable. He does this by sleeping with as many men as he can. “Don’t look at those prints on the floor!” He demanded, “You’ll see the real ones at the show. We’d better get ready. It’s getting late.” I was pretty tired from my trip but we had to be at the Gallery within the hour.
We arrived at Peres Projects and Dean quickly introduced me to his friends and left me in their charge. This was a working night for him so they were going have to entertain me. I quickly made friends with a young woman he knew. I can’t remember her name, but she works at the gallery. “So I hear you’re in San Francisco now. How is that working out?”
“Oh, it’s ok. I sometimes feel as though I’ve beached myself by moving back there. It’s nice not having a car.”
“I thought you were going to move here. What happened?”
“I’m broke, and the Germans aren’t very accommodating. It’s not enough to just want to live here.” She patted me on my back, grabbed my hand and led me to the bar. “Let’s get drunk. I’m off tonight and you look like you could use a drink.”
Jetlag is a helluva thing — especially when you mix it with booze and cocaine. My lovely new friend leading me to the bar is one the last things I remember about Dean’s show. The rest of the night I’ve been able to piece together with bits of loose memory and from what Dean and his friends have told me.
It sounded like, for a time, I held it together pretty well. I do remember the staff putting me to work serving wine until I began to “get loud” after a quick trip to the bathroom where someone had offered me some cocaine to help with my jetlag. Later in the evening I remember us all at a nice restaurant eating steak. I told everyone at the table that I was “molested by my mother” and that “my family was part of the clan that founded The Los Angeles Times.” Sometimes people convicted of rape or murder say that they had watched themselves commit their crime as though they were outside of their bodies. Like a murderer, I watched myself make a scene at my friend’s art opening in Berlin and I couldn’t do a damn thing to stop it. The cocaine had taken over, and the rest the evening belonged to it and it alone. Luckily, my memories from this point on are forever lost.
I awoke the next morning lying in bed next to Dean. It was my birthday. I felt like shit and, as with all my hangovers, I had an erection. I turned away to try to hide it from him. As I did this, he playfully slapped me atop my head. “You wear American Apparel butt-huggers? Faggot!” I noticed then that I was lying in bed in only my underwear. He tugged on my shoulder and turned me around noticing the tent in my gay skivvies. “Ahhh, you’re horny?” It was embarrassing, but I figured I might get some action for my birthday. “Jack off for me,” he said. Well, it was better than nothing.
So there I was, spending my 40th birthday trying to take the edge off of a night of doing drugs by masturbating in front of my friend in Berlin. I was about to come when I started to obsess about the comment Dean had made about my panties. Did he think I wasn’t butch enough for him? How pathetic did I look jerking off in purple underwear? Even with this going on in my head, it didn’t take long for me to come. I was pretty wound up from the dope. “There ya go. Feel better?” he asked.
“Yes. Thanks for letting me do that Dean.”
“Don’t mention it. Happy Birthday Kurt.”
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