Many years ago, der Brucer took me on my first trip to Europe. Three weeks, with stops in London, Berlin, Munich, Amsterdam, and back to London. I had never traveled before, never even flown before, and he had a real adventure planned for me.
London was wonderful, of course, but he’d planned our trip dividing our stay there into two parts, sort of as an acclimatizing cushion for the German leg of the journey. This was back in the days when the Wall still stood, and air access to Berlin was limited to specific corridors and specific airlines. Still, it was a thrill that night as we flew up over London, which looked quite like the animated sequence in Disney’s Peter Pan, only without our stopping to stand on the clock face of Big Ben’s tower.
Landing in Berlin was something else again. The weather had turned grumpy, and the decent was rapid. A part of my stomach didn’t want to make the trip downward. Even when we were on the ground, there were problems with recovering our luggage, due to the late hour. As a result, we caught what must have been the last bus from the airport into Berlin.
This caused our next problem: der Brucer had booked us into a place called “Tom’s Hotel,” gay owned and operated and themed on the drawings of Tom of Finland. (Look him up, if you have to; I’m not going to go into details here.) Unfortunately, by the time we got there, the innkeeper had retired for the night, and there was no way of getting our room. Fortunately, there was a bar downstairs, called “Tom’s Bar” (similarly themed, of course), where der B was able to get some information on where we might find a place for the night. He parked me at the bar, with our luggage, and headed into the drizzle outside to locate the place.
I might not have traveled much, but I had been around a bit. Tom’s Bar had a back room, and I didn’t need Marlene singing to know that her song was wrongly worded. It wasn’t so much what the boys in the back room were having, but whom. I decided it would be better to stay towards the front, where the films being shown on the television were erotic enough. Finally, a couple of hours later, der Brucer re-appeared. “Sorry,” he told me as we gathered up the luggage, “I had a hard time finding the street the hotel is on.” By this time, I was tired enough that I didn’t care. “The hotel should be good enough for just this one night. Besides,” he added, “it’s only the rooms on the same floor as the hotel bar that rent by the hour.”
The hotel room was small, basically habitable, and not quite squalid. The bathroom was down the hall, and mostly functional. We had at least found a place to stay for the night. When I’m tired, and it’s October, I learn to cope. The odd thing was, it really wasn’t too bad, seen in the next morning’s light. We weren’t planning to spend a lot of time in the room, after all, with tourist day trips occupying most of our days. And it was secure enough.
We ended up staying there for the entire three days we were in Berlin. It just wasn’t worth the bother of moving to another hotel. I will say, however, that the room we found in Munich, our next stop, was far more satisfying, aesthetically. I wonder, however, if we were to return to Berlin today, whether that hotel would still be there.
And I also wonder if I’d have the sense, or lack of same, to stay there again.
