beats like butter, baby

Written by Cathoel Jorss, published 12 years ago

Cavernous cafe in Berlin during the changeover period from Friday afternoon caff to Friday night bar. The music is gradually speeding up and the staff become flirtier, including with each other. People still working on their laptops are hunched with concentration, trying to get it all down. Two extremely buff men who came in with an old-fashioned upright pram have their son on their laps, spoon-feeding him. The boy is fat as butter and looks calmly round the shadowy room. In German I read in a gossip magazine how dearly Brad Pitt loves Angelina Jolie and how he was tirelessly by her side during her recent ordeal. Outside, the sun is glary-bright and like snowflakes the fluffy little seeds of some flowering tree pursue their airy way through the day. Things seem slow and sunstruck but with the glimmering promise of sex with a stranger, the inimical glamour and disillusion of city evenings. A thin guy rolls in behind his stack of pallets of soft drinks on a sack truck. A muscular guy whose muscle is running to fat pulls over blaringly in his topless black vehicle, parks at an angle and leaves the engine running with an intolerably loud and banal dance track pumping. I am thinking about running out to turn the volume down, just to piss him off. I’m drinking a milkshake with cucumber and mint. Its clear fresh milky taste pleases my body. Berliners are smokers, people walk by with their head in the clouds. The fat muscleman leaps into his car and pulls out, jerking his hand to let the taxi driver who’s had to screech to a halt know, I am going first. The taxi driver is Turkish: he stretches his mouth whimsically. His hand falls on its back like a cat. He’s relaxed. “If you want to, man. If you have to, dude.”