I walked across the street and went to the courtyard of the Kőpi. It was a building covered in Punk and anarchist graffiti. I had never seen anything like it. When I first arrived, no one was around. So I sat outside and smoked cigarettes. It was very cold and I shivered while I waited. Finally someone came out of the building and I asked him if he had seen Katja, who was my contact at the Kőpi. He said no, he had not seen her, but he invited me in. I helped him and his girlfriend set something up inside and we cooked breakfast and made coffee. After a while, it was clear that Katja was not around so they told me to come back later. I walked around Kruezberg a bit. When I came back, Katja took me into the guest room but it turned out to be occupied. A nice girl in another room offered to put me up for a night in the kitchen. I went to the bar in the Kőpi to hang out for a bit.
In the morning, I knew that I had to move to the Schwarzerkanal, which was a feminist and queer trailer park, because there wasn't really a space for me the Kőpi. I had some coffee and then headed one kilometer down the road to a grassy field on the river Spree. There I found the Swarzerkanal.
The trailer park was filled with trailers that had been converted to living spaces and had wood stoves in some of them. Some of them were small but others were quite spacious. I was shown to my trailer which was very small but nice. I was the only man there. I ended up making friends with this woman named Willow from Wales. We often talked at night but after a week she left.
The nights were very cold in Berlin. Even though I had a wood stove, it was never enough. I always ended up shivering myself to sleep and then sleeping in really late. I spent most of my nights at the Kőpi at a punk show or watching a movie. Sometimes I would spend my time going to different places in Kruezberg, like the New Yorck which was an activist center near where the wall used to be, or to the Trinktueffel which was the oldest punk bar in Berlin. Sometimes I would just read by candlelight in my trailer and listen to music.
I would try to be social and talk to people over coffee at the trailer park but sometimes people would just straight-up say that they do not want to talk to me. The whole time I was there I basically tried to stay out of people's way. I took no food from the common food. I kept asking if there was anything I could do to help but every time I asked people would say there was nothing for me to do. In the end I ended up getting blamed for not helping enough and people said that I should know what to do without asking to help. This was probably true but at that time I was completely green and clueless to the squatting culture. On the 14th of December, I asked people if they wanted to go out with me for my birthday but no one wanted to. I ended up going to the Trinktuefel and drinking with this girl who also had her birthday that day.
A couple days before Christmas Schwarzerkanal informed me that I would have to be out before Christmas because some friends of theirs were coming to visit. The day before Christmas I spent the whole day walking around to all the squats in Berlin which I had found in the Stressfaktor, a publication that lists all the squats and punk and anarchist events in Berlin. I went to places all throughout the city to ask them if I could stay. I kept on getting rejected.
My last stop that day was at a vokű, a community meal, at the Ballast der Republik on Brunnenstrasse. I arrived at the punk squat at 8 and got some food and had a drink. I noticed most of the people at the punk squat were Polish or Eastern European. The people at the bar were very open and friendly but a little bit crazy. It was a lot different from other squats in Berlinwhich tended to be more subdued. After I washed my plate and ordered another beer from the bar, I ended up talking to the bartender, a blond man from Poland in his 40s. I asked him if I could stay some weeks in the squat. He said that it shouldn't be a problem and he introduced me to some of the older polish punks. These punks had founded the squat in the early 90’s.
The bartender told me to ask a heavyset Punk with a large nose ring if I could stay at the squat and he said it was fine. I ended up hanging out with everyone for a couple hours. They told me how the Polish punks had founded the squat after the Berlin wall had fallen.
The next day I moved into the Ballast der Republik. I was on the first floor in 1 of three five-floor buildings that comprised the squat. I shared the room I was staying in with a Lithuanian Punk couple. The girl was in her early twenties and the guy was in his mid-thirties. The man was very funny, impulsive and often drunk. The girl was very serious and up front but kind. They had travelled Europe together. The last place they had lived was Amsterdam.
At the squat on Bűnnenstrasse, the toilet was on the bucket flush system. This meant you had to pour a bucket of water down the toilet to flush the toilet, but at first I didn't know how to use it. When I first got there, I would pee in the bucket because I didn't think the toilet worked. I happened to mention this one time to my roommate. They told me, “That is not how this is done” and laughed hysterically. They told me that sometimes a girl washed her hands in the bucket.
The place was pretty Bohemian with groups of people showing up in the middle of the night to hang out and old punks painting pictures in the kitchen. One of the punks was raising puppies. I spent a lot of my time there reading Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine which is an extraordinary book that describes how politicians and businesses use times of disaster and crisis to manipulate poor countries and people. Sometimes the Balast der Republik had concerts; these concerts were always wild.
I would often be alone and on New Year's Eve I happened to find myself alone. The saying about New Year's Eve is there's always pressure to have a good time because it's supposed to be the happiest day of the year but I've often found that this pressure often leads to disappointment. I was alone and I wanted to have fun so I ended up going to every bar that looked interesting. I would have one drink and then move on to different bars. This was going pretty well. I love to dance so I was dancing with girls here and there but I was just dancing to dance and I wasn't trying to hit on anybody.
Everything was fine until I ended up at a bar on the Rigaerstrasse. At this bar, they were playing some 80's music and I was dancing with this girl. Again, I was not hitting on her. All of a sudden, I find myself on the floor and this guy with a bald head is above me kicking me in the ribs. I get escorted out of the bar and I hit the bouncer on the way out. He did not hit me back. At the ubahn station I run into one of the girls I was dancing with and she said that they shouldn't have done that. I stumbled back to the squat and made it back into my room. I took a drink out of what I believed was an orange juice bottle but it turned out to be my roommate’s piss. I spit it out and I went to sleep. I could hardly move for the next couple of days.
Even before my New Year's Eve misadventure, it was clear that it was best if I moved on from the Ballast der Republik. On Christmas Eve, I ate a Christmas meal with the residents of Reichenberger 63a. When I walked into the place, I passed by antifa graffiti. The corridor to the courtyard was filled with a group of Turkish teenagers smoking weed.The place was not as punk as the Ballast der Republik and consisted mostly of German leftist and a few international guests. The dinner was very delicous. At the end of the night, I got into a very interesting conversation about the intersections between queer and disability theory. Everyone said that I could stay there after January 5th.
The 3rd of January was one of my last days at the Ballast der Republik. There was a party at the bar. I was hanging out with some of the Polish punks and the Lithuanian punks who shared my room with me. I was going to leave the squat the next day and I wanted to make my last night at the Ballast der Republik a great one. Everyone was in great spirits. We were all a bit drunk. The bar was playing classic German Punk songs and a lot of people were singing along.
All of a sudden, a group of German punks came in. They were all a little bit rowdy. One of them was a cute blonde German girl with blue eyes named Lina who was with her brother who was wearing a police hat as a joke and then there was a girl with black dreadlocks. A lot of the Polish punks started to flirt with the girls but I hung back and drank my beer.
After a while, I needed to get a new beer and I found myself at the bar next to Lina. We started talking to each other and making jokes and laughing. After that, we started dancing and then we kissed. I told her that I liked her energy. And she told me that she liked me too. I asked her why and she told me she liked me because I was different and because I liked her. We moved into the stage room where they were playing German pop music from the 80s and Punk. We continue dancing and kissing. She told me that I kissed too fast and that I should slow down and enjoy it. I listened to her advice. She was a fantastic kisser and I was really enjoying it. She told me that just because we were kissing it didn't mean that we would have sex. I told her I was very happy just kissing her and I meant it. The last thing I remember was her giving me her number and email. I kept it in a safe place.
The next day I move to the Reichenburger 63A and I had a really big room on the top floor. That day I wrote Lina and told her that it was fantastic meeting her and that I really wanted to see her again. A day later, she wrote me back. She told me that she was really surprised I had written her after the way she had behaved. Apparently one of the Polish guys had grabbed her friend with the dreadlocks in the crotch and Lina had gone off about how she hated all men. I absolutely did not remember that. She was really glad that I had written her because she had really liked me and thought I had behaved like a perfect gentleman. I told her that that was the only time that it was fortunate that I had blacked out. We arranged to meet in two days time at a concert at the Ballast der Republik.
After two days, I went to the Ballast der Republik to meet Lina. I arrived early and hung out with my friends there. The concert was supposed to start at 10 and that was the time I was supposed to meet Lena. I was fucking nervous so I got a little bit drunk. 10:30 passed and Lina still hadn't shown up so I went to the concert room. I thought Lina had stood me up. I was trying to enjoy myself. The music was really good and my friends were there. 30 minutes later Lina showed up and she was as nervous as I was. She had been looking for me for 15 minutes and she thought I had stood her up. We immediately kissed. We danced a bit and grab a couple of drinks. We then decided that we should have some time alone and I asked the Lithuanian couple if we could stay in their room. They said yes.
We went into my old room and started kissing but I wanted to do more and she wanted to do more. When I made a move to escalate, the Lithuanian Punks walked in. She then said we couldn't do anything because we were not alone. After awhile of just kissing, she asked me if I wanted to go up to the kitchen and fuck. I followed dutifully.
Unfortunately I was quite drunk and I had whiskey dick. I ate her out and she came several times. After a while, I asked her if she could suck me. She was going at it for a couple minutes when a bunch of people walked into the room. We got dressed really quickly and drank some coffee with the people and ate something. She whispered to me that it made her excited that they knew what we were doing when they walked in. We hung out together for a little bit and then went to bed in each other's arms.
A day or two later I was going to go to Ireland. I wrote her that I would like to see her again and then she wrote me back that she would like to see me too but unfortunately she could not because of school but that she would remember what we did before she went to bed.
