Hollis Gillespie’s The Ugly American

It’s generally not my policy to piss off drunk people—especially foreign-speaking drunk people surrounded by broken bottles and stolen bikes—but there was no way around it. The Berlin Wall was set to be demolished piece by piece, and you just didn’t know how long it would take them to get around to this particular section, the one with all the art on it.

Of course there were other sections with art on it, nice fashionable sections with a conditorie or a stuebli nearby, and people in them, sipping stuff. There were velvet ropes around those sections already. Well, practically.

It was this other section, Schlesisches Tor, where a shanty collective of shirtless criminals calling themselves “artists” had set up a tent city. Daily they’d stumble from their lean-tos and yell at people to stop hammering the wall, wielding any weapon at hand. Or at least they did every day I went there, which—given my job as a bad German interpreter—was once a week back then, during the “fall of the Wall.”

I still marvel at the fact I ever arrived there in the first place. A few months prior I’d qualified as a foreign-language translator, but I always suspected I’d passed the exam more because I’d made my assessor laugh than because of any actual knack for languages. She’d even brought people in from the hallway to hear me. “Tell him about the ‘storm in your stomach,’” she’d howled after I finished updating her on my recovery from Montezuma’s revenge, “especially the part about your ‘exploding ass!’”

I’d taken the test on a whim, kinda, figuring on two years living in Zurich with my mother, who at the time was building bombs for the Swiss government—not for them to use themselves, mind you (seeing as how Swiss people are neutral and all), but for them to sell to the Turkish government, who surely used them as decorative bookends. I figured two years of being entwined in this type of multilingual denial might count for something, so I took the test and damn if I didn’t pass.

DISAPPEARING ART, A SOLITARY LENS
It was an occasion that coincided with the fall of communism in Europe, so I was repeatedly dispatched to Berlin, and, each time, I’d return to Schlesisches Tor hauling my decrepit 35mm Fujico, a virtual relic with an automatic winding mechanism that sounded about as subtle as a diesel truck shifting into third gear. That’s what always alerted the tent-town people to my presence, although they eventually downgraded their threats to a general grumpiness when they finally concluded I wasn’t there to hammer myself off a hunk after all.

No. I was there because I was cursed and couldn’t help it. Every visit, and there were lots, garnered absolute acres of fresh art; colossal vistas of angry expression—entire landscapes of pain and elation—and it was all temporary. New artists came almost as fast as the old ones left, ready to augment the existing vistas or cover them completely with their own work. It was like witnessing the creation of animated films in slow motion, or the making of history in fast forward.

The tent people grew to endure me, probably because, oddly, I seemed to be their only fan. I never saw another photographer and never understood why. The last time I went, the entire section was covered in massive scaffolding but not yet wrecked, and one lone lean-to remained. It belonged to the angry guy, who was now drunk and blubbering. I tried talking to him in German, florid phrases crusted with sentiment, but he waved me off with his gin. “Bloody hell,” he said with a perfect British accent, and then he vomited on his feet.