I Sleep in Hitler's Room (24 page)

Werner also tells me that when people start using heroin, “what they experience will take a normal person twenty years of meditation in the Himalayas to experience.” The problem is that with time this effect evaporates and all that remains is a terrible addiction.

Dr. Hamid Zokai, who is the psychiatrist here, enters the room.

Why are you here?

“I had a lot of personal problems, I had a personal crisis at the time.”

I love it! You can’t get it better than a psychiatrist sharing with you his deep neurotic, maybe even psychotic secrets. My face lights up like that of a child with ice cream.

Werner, seeing my happy face, warns Dr. Hamid that everything he says will be read by many Germans.

Dr. Hamid thinks about this and decides not to talk about himself. Too bad. Werner, with his Third World dreams, put the fear of God in Dr. Hamid’s heart, depriving me of a first-rate story today!

But there’s no time to think about this. It’s feeding time. One by one the addicts enter the building.

My phone rings. What timing!

It’s “George” of Bank of America Merrill Lynch. He needs to send a letter to London, he tells me, to get an approval from the Compliance Section for him to talk to me under his name. The response will come in twenty-four hours, he says, and most likely I will still not be able to use his name and, if he goes through with this process, he would like me not to mention Bank of America Merrill Lynch either. What’s my preference?

Don’t contact London, I tell him.

“OK. You don’t mention my name, but you can mention Bank of America Merrill Lynch. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Got you, Mr. George.

For the record: Neither “George” nor Bank of America Merrill Lynch Compliance Section in London are shooting heroin.

Back to the addicts; they are here.

There are “stations” the addicts must go through before getting their portion. First they come in. At the first station they leave their bags, if they showed up with one. Then they take an alcohol test. If they are drunk, ship out. This is a respectable place. If they are sober, they move on. Next Room,
bitte
. Here they get their portion. But this is not the end. With heroin in hand, they proceed to pick up cleaning materials. You must clean yourself and your little corner once you are done!

Addicts are not leisurely shoppers. Addicts have no time. Addicts rush. Very focused, like a tiger that hasn’t had anything to eat for a month, the addict rushes to a table and immediately gets to work. Roll up a sleeve, unbutton a shirt, or pull down some pants. All depending on how they fancy to shoot their liquid dream into themselves. Some like it next to their private parts. Just so. As close as possible. Fully concentrating, more so than a research astronomer focused on the moon of a distant planet, they check for the spot, the vein. And then they inject.

Here is an older man, he likes it in his thighs. There is a young woman, she likes it in the middle of her pubic hair. Everybody and their customs, everybody and their preferences. And then it’s done. Roll back whatever they’ve rolled up or down, clean the mess, and move to the last station, a closed section. Here they smoke, relax, have a talk, or meditate with the spirits. They must stay here for some time before they are allowed to leave.

Every step of the process is precise, like a Daimler engine. Exact and on time. None of these people have any control over what they are doing. The heroin controls them. It’s their master, and they are its slaves. But you wouldn’t know it if you met them on the street. They look normal. Not like bankers, mind you, but normal still.

In this Capital of the Unwilling, this corner of the city houses the utmost Unwillingness, unwillingness greater than which you will not meet. This is the end of the road. The next stop from here is the moon.

Thomas, an older addict, is relaxing at the moment. “This place,” he says, “saved my life.” He started heroin, he tells me, at age sixteen. “My friends were artists, musicians. That was in Munich. The good music was written under the influence of heroin. I wasn’t an artist, but my friends were. I started then and haven’t stopped since. I was in jail. Many times. I was thieving—not from people, only from corporations—and was in prison. I was selling dope on the street and got caught. In Munich, when I was in prison there, they didn’t give me heroin. Not even methadone. They gave me codeine. Was not easy. Codeine, to calm me down. If I don’t have heroin, I puke and I have to urinate every twenty minutes. I was in jail in many places. Altogether, eleven years. But now it’s good. I come here in the morning, get my dose, and then I go to work. I work in the zoo. I have to do public work. Three thousand hours, the court said. I work with apes. I feed them and I clean them. Then I come here, get my dose. After I get my dose I go to eat lunch. I get a big meal for one euro. It’s a government program. Very good. I go back to the apes after I eat, and after that I come here by 4:20. People who work can come as late as 4:20. I get my dose and I go to the park. Meet friends, play with them, and at night I go back to my flat and go to sleep. Three and a half years like this. The government pays my rent, and they pay for my food. And for the heroin. I don’t have to sell dope. Now I have to get my second portion, my second half, excuse me. I took only the first half.”

That’s it. A whole life, a full biography, from A to Z, of a man named Thomas.

When you first see this, it flies by you. And you go on. Back to the streets of Frankfurt. Prostitutes and hijab wearers, financiers and beggars, all mixing with each other.

It’s a beautiful day. Nature is nice. No ash clouds and no rain. I stroll the streets and window-shop. Here’s a small wallet in a fashionable store for only 500 euros. I am not sure, but this might be on sale. Some people use wallets to store their money, others use money to fill out their wallets. It all depends on how much you’ve got. This is Frankfurt, Germany, the seat of the European Central Bank. It is here where, for the right sum, all your sweet dreams can turn into sugary reality.

And then it hits me, the Nightmare. Suddenly. The men and the women and their shots. Their faces suddenly stare at me. The holes in their bodies jump into my eyes. I don’t know how it happened, but it did. The people who “stopped their biographies” come to me. Like mice in a cage. The humans turn into ghosts. And these ghosts are with me now. Hours after I left them, they return. To haunt me. They insinuate themselves into the most private corners of my heart, they violate every sacred part of me, and they darken every light within me. They demand attention, and they want me to die with them. They offer me no way out. I can’t push them away with the power of my muscles, because they have entered my mind. I can’t shut off my eyes, because they have infiltrated my soul. They possess me. They are the walking dead. And they walk over my head. If they have anything to teach me, if they have anything to say, it is an awful message: Human life is really worthless. A little liquid in the system and see how ugly we all are. We are made of crazed flesh and that’s all there is to us.

I am trying to run away from them, or have them leave me alone. But it’s not an easy task. My heart goes out to them, no matter how empty and shallow all of them might be. But I know I can’t help them; these machines are beyond repair.

You can’t turn a mouse into an eagle, even in Frankfurt.

Let me leave Frankfurt! I take the train out. Out to Nauheim.

Have you been to Nauheim?

When people disappoint you, try to befriend buildings. Nice buildings. Villas. Old-style villas. Nauheim is blessed with a great selection of them. Houses so beautiful you want to eat them, to lick their facades. If you are ever in a crisis that you deem larger than you, try Nauheim before you start injecting yourself with certain liquids.

Bad Nauheim, as it’s officially called, has invented a subtitle for itself:
Die
Gesundheitsstadt
(the health city). Blow your own horns, kid. Why not? And raise your cover charge accordingly, wherever and whenever you can. Consequently, every Healthy thing here is costly. The
Gradirebau
, or
Saliene
, as the locals call it, is an interesting invention: Dripping waters over tree branches that are fixed on a huge wall. Don’t ask me, but people here think it makes you breathe better. I try it. I sit down, smoke a cigarette, and really enjoy the sound of wasted water. It’s an experience. I don’t belittle it. I know that the next time I’m in the Sahara Desert I’ll miss it terribly.

Bad Nauheim is a money factory, where you get charged for everything and anything. But, at least as of this writing, they don’t charge you for strolling the streets. It’s good for me. The beauty of this place pushes away the heroin-shooting mice in my head.

When night falls I go to Butzbach. Heard of Butzbach? It’s a place, a town. A delightful dot on the map. I am staying at Farah’s. Farah is a Persian woman I first met in Tunisia. She didn’t like Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and she moved to Germany. She hasn’t been to Iran for many, many years, but she’s proud as hell to be Iranian. She is happy to be in this country, but she doesn’t give the German people very high marks.

They are very exact,” she says of the Germans, “and when they make mistakes they make them very exact as well.” She has many sayings, Farah. Her aphorism of the day is “The Germans think they killed the Jews, but who they really killed is themselves.” “They are people who don’t like to be themselves.”

Farah, by the way, has a soft spot for the Jews. With the financial crisis going on in the world, she asks me, “What will happen with the Jews?”

Should something special happen to the Jews? I ask her.

“Now the Jews will be blamed,” she says.

The Jews? Why the Jews?

She looks at me as if were totally retarded. “They are the financiers!” she says.

Jews again. Almost every day.

I never felt so Jewish in my life as I feel here, in this Germany.

I came to Germany to find the Germans, but what happens is that they find me.

Who was the man who said that the Germans don’t have a sense of humor?

Whoever he was, he’s wrong!

My financier “George,” for the record, is not Jewish. And he’s ready to meet again. After all, he still owes me an answer, an explanation for what drives him. We meet, where else, at the café of Steigenberger Frankfurter Hof.

Yes, I’m back in Frankfurt.

So, why are you still working so hard to make money? What drives you?

“Chess,” he says. “The game. It’s a game. Not poker, but chess. It is a complicated game, you need skill. Those are exciting things. I don’t do it for the money, I do it for the game. If I happen to make a million or two, that’s great. But it’s not about that, it’s about finding out what makes the other side tick.”

Why aren’t you playing chess at the Kleinmarkthalle (a local market place), right here in Frankfurt? I would love to see you playing next to the wursts and the Frikadelles (German meatball) and the chickens. I can arrange a chess table for you, if you want. Should I?

“Very funny. I owe Deutsche Bank quite some money for my various properties. I need to make money, you understand?”

OK, let’s put everything on the table: How many buildings do you need?

“George” looks at me as if I were Mr. Lenin. But I am not. I swear. I don’t know one word of Russian.

“George” is very clear-minded. We talk about many things; his mind is sharp, and his arguments are always to the point. Except on this one issue.

Why is he so complex on this one point? I feel, after long talks with him, that he’s actually driven by greed but can’t bring himself to admit it.

I have time. I don’t work for Bank of America. So why not use my time to help a helpless Unwilling European Capitalist? I try to guide him into the Promised Land.

Say after me:

I—

“—I—”

—am—

“—am—”

—greedy.

“Won’t say it.”

Why not?

“I would feel low.”

He doesn’t deny his greed, he just can’t admit it, because he “would feel low.” I point this out to him and ask him if that was a “terrible Freudian slip.” “George” stares at me, as if I were the Real Devil.

Yes, I know. I use the terms Capitalist and Unwilling Capitalist often. But it’s not because of me; it’s because I keep hearing it, or some variations of it. I’m always the Capitalist, because I come from New York, and the German is always some kind of a socialist, because—well, just because. Using this logic, “George” is some kind of a socialist while I’m the Pure Capitalist. Something in this picture looks funny.

Yes, I know: I own Goldman Sachs, AT&T, Macy’s, Verizon, and American Airlines, and I control the foreign policy of the US government. But I have debts as well, the war in Iraq costs me a fortune!

I’m getting nowhere with “George” talking finance. I must change the subject. There’s this terrible silence between us, the greedy American and the righteous European. What topic should I choose? Well, why not my favorite one: the Germans.

What do you think of the Germans? You’ve live here many, many years—

“Germans are consensus-driven, by and large not very charming, not very humorous, are ponderous and heavy, tremendously organized, excellent engineers, not natural financiers, tend to extremism, and many of them have demonstrated innate cruelty.”

Wow!!! Anything good?

“They created fantastic music and literature.”

What did you mean, “consensus-driven”?

“Everything must be decided by consensus. Bosses with employees, companies with unions. In every segment of society. They decide together.”

Should I tell “George” of my
Verein
Theory? No, not yet. Let me check and verify it some more before I announce it to the world.

“George” leaves, to make more money, and I am stuck with a question in my head: What is this strong drive, the drive for money, that makes us all so obsessed?

The most plausible place on earth to find an answer to this question would be in the money temple, the local stock exchange, wouldn’t you agree?