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been to a meeting was genuinely warm, I felt. It was true that not to drink could make a drunk feel alone and lost.
    When I hear recordings of Cecil Taylor live, I am once again downstairs in a West Berlin club, back in the golden age of chain smoking, drinking another glass of white wine in the free zone of staying up all night, talking out the lyric dark, and then falling still as his instrument meets the dawning light—“the brewing luminosity,” Taylor called it. Memory will let in the cool scenes, the hip blowouts. However, the real truth of my summer life in Berlin was held by the plastic interior of a tacky bar. Only the year before I’d spent whole days and nights in the ChiChi Bar, a dive set back from a wide, leafy deserted street behind the plaza of Europa Center.
    I’d hung out in the ChiChi since my first trip to West Berlin. My fourth night there I let myself be picked up by a nice French girl and the night after that I successfully chatted up a boy from a small West German town. I’d shaken off the sour-smelling old man with his fake Ballets Russes act. The bar’s owners, Zippi and Odell, tore up my tab for the night my last night in town. In the years following, the first thing I’d do when I got back to town was head to Europa Center. No matter what I got up to in between, I ended my holidays licking my wounds at the ChiChi. I sent Zippi and Odell amusing postcards.
    There was a traditional high culture that Cello and Dram lived in and there was an alternative high culture that I was about to go to work in, but the Berlin I lived in with my soul was around the train station and the porn theaters, the cheap lights and fried-food stalls. There were also loud beer bars and serious bookstores tucked under the S-Bahn tracks. I felt at home in a bad bar that did very well. Maybe the ChiChi had been “in” in the ’70s. It was listed as a gay bar in out-of-date guides, although anybody and everybody could be found there. White women scored with the black men more than the white men did. I perhaps wrongly assumed that things went on between the black men, American and African, but not counting Odell’s buddies. It hardly mattered, because the real business of everyone there was to drink.
    Addiction insulated the bar against fashion. There was a group of regulars who’d put in much bar time together. They were the audience for the life-changing mistakes that the ChiChi specialized in. It was a place where people experiencing a bad night strayed in to finish things off with meltdowns, blackouts, fistfights, seizures. Sex was just the messy afterthought, something to do when daylight hit.
    “What time do you close here?” I asked Zippi my first night at the ChiChi.
    She lifted her head from the bar. “We are never closed here.”
    In all of my walks when first back in Berlin as a recovering alcoholic, I never let myself go to Europa Center. If I got out at Zoo Station, I took a long, roundabout way to Cello’s apartment, just to avoid going by the old smells and sights. Avoid people, places, and things, I wanted someone to say at my AA meeting in Dahlem, because I’d yet to open my mouth in that meeting. Back up in the center of town, I’d walk with my final cigarette of the day and look down the Ku’damm toward the bright intersection and the street that led up to the train station. I could feel my steps continuing. I always loved the sound of my footsteps in Berlin. The Negro in Europe.
    And I knew they’d be there at the ChiChi. It was never too early for Odell to slap a wet towel on the bar and Zippi to slam the cash register. There was always a fight going on between them; there were always drinks of some kind sitting in front of them. Maybe Big Dash had come in, reeking of Indian spices. I could see them, some of whom I’d groped, quiet because it was early yet, drinking fast, their cigarette packs and fancy lighters on the bar, on their way to not needing to drink as fast, and not one of them