Greetings from Berlin, dear reader. I don’t how you’re doing with your lockdown, but our sequel here in Berlin has been going OK for me. And when I say OK, I mean good and bad.
Besides the Netflix junkie behavior, obsessing over bread on Instagram yet cooking none myself, and sitting round the campfire with my existential dread, being couped up alone is having some other odd side effects on my life.
The announcement this week that Lockdown 2 was being extended to December 20th prompted two thoughts; 1. The Chancellor has avoided being the Canceller of Xmas, although the mistletoe has been savagely pruned and, 2. I took the news a lot harder than I thought I would.
Despite the above, overall I’m taking better care of myself, reading books (not just ordering them), and taking more hours in the week for German studies. But knowing that Lockdown is getting tragically extended like the last two seasons of House of Cards, saddened me.
In the words of the great Seal on his first album, “It’s the loneliness that’s the killer.”
We’re making a lot here in Berlin out of the fact that every cultural venue is closed yet the shops are open. Black Friday at Kadewe looked like Berghain on a Saturday night. But on the upside, all the doctors and specialists are still seeing patients, so I figured I’d get all those nagging aches, pains and things seen too. You know, the ones you save up all year.
My December is starting to look like a hypochondriac’s Advent Calendar; “On the 12th day of Christmas, my doctor gave to me, a prescription for manual therapy…”
Anyway, somehow over the last two years in Berlin I forgot to go to the dentist. I have had no pain or anything, but it was time for a proper cleaning. I’d called to make the appointment. My German is at that stage where speaking on the phone to a stranger is not a problem. The problem, is that damn clock.
In Europe, it’s a 24 hour clock. In the rest of the world, it’s the 12 Hour. So I make these mistakes where I hear, “dreizehn Uhr,” and instead of writing it in my calendar as 13 o’clock or 1pm, my brain hears the “three” and notes it as 3pm, or fünfzehn Uhr.
I can’t tell you how happy the lady on the front desk was when I turned up simultaneously ten minutes early and two hours late for my appointment. Punctuality is a quirk of the German people. Which I absolutely love. They name a time. And they mean precisely that time. This is where the Venn diagram of the blue circle for Germany, and red circle for Karl, make a big patch of purple.
LA Time, for instance, runs culturally 20–30 minutes later than German. “I’m on my way,” means, “I’m getting off the sofa.” Gay Time? Depends on the gay, but a good 30–60 minutes behind German. Much longer for fashion queens. Drag Time tho…
Back at the dentist, the front desk lady let rip. She’d had 110 minutes to prepare what was a very fast and furious speech as I mumbled apologies from behind my mask. I then sat quietly in the chair she’d pointed at so hard she’d made a hole in the air. And I watched her stack and staple a lot of papers.
But like, a lot.
As the minutes ticked by, I began to wonder what she’d said. You see, there’s Hochdeutsch which is High German. Like the German version of Queen’s English. Then there’s Heißdeutsch, Hot German. That’s the German you hear when you fuck up. You hear a lot in your early days in the country. But it’s a dialect I still don’t understand very well. She’d spoken in Hot German before and I was wondering if she’d meant I was supposed to face the wall or something before she’d speak to me again.
Then suddenly, a sharp, “Dunn!” cut through the room and I jumped from my seat, wondering if I’d peed my pants a little. A further appointment was made for the following morning. She asked me if I needed it written down. I said no. Then she handed me the card where she’d written it down.
The next morning, I rang the doorbell expecting the worst. Only, I was greeted by the same front desk lady, all smiles this time. Oh okay, I thought, that’s good. I almost took the same waiting room seat, then chose another one straight away. Still too much ju-ju on the first.
In no time at all I was in the dentist’s chair, slung back, chatting with the Zahnartz. And the front desk lady as it turned out, was the dental nurse too. She had to mention my lateness one more time though, and the dentist commented in German, “Oh, that was you! Mister 12 hour clock,” and we all laughed. Well, at least now I understand jokes at my own expense in German. While everyone wears masks. Progress.
Then with my mouth wide open and him poking around in there, I was thinking that dentists must have one of the most dangerous jobs in COVID times. This thought train was interrupted by him announcing a cavity he’d found. Very light and in my rear tooth. But it definitely needed a filling. I explained that I felt no pain there. Then he said that was good, we’d caught it early.
I’ve been blessed with great teeth. I’ve had a whole two fillings in my life. My teeth are textbook straight, never had braces. Maybe that’s my other X-Men power? Going to the dentist once a year is like visiting a car wash for me. So when I heard the drill start up, my sweating did to. I’d come in for a cleaning. I had not prepared for this. Because nothing freaks me out more than the sound of a dentist’s drill. Except the sound of that drill vibrating through my own skull.
“Don’t you think I need an anesthetic?” I asked, very grateful that so many medical words are the same in English. To this he replied with a very casual, “Sehen mal.” Let’s see? What? And with that, the drill was against my tooth and I started yoga breathing through my nose as I white knuckled the armrests of the chair.
My mind reeled back to the lovely dentist I’d had in LA, Helen, who’d done my last filling. Helen was one of the nicest, gentlest souls I’d ever met. Getting anesthetic was a given and she would talk me through every single step while she was doing it. No such chairside manner here. So I focused on the one thing that Helen had said to me on my last visit. “Oh, you’re going to Germany!” she’d exclaimed, “They have the best dentists in the world, everyone in the industry thinks so. I’m jealous.”
It was right at this point that the dentist found the nerve in my tooth he’d been looking for. I squirmed in my chair and yelled out. The dentist stopped, pulled out the drill, looked at me and said, “Maybe some anesthetic then.”
Why not? Let’s get crazy.
I barely felt the needle. And then in just a minute, everything was cool. Like Miles Davis cool. The fight or flight reflex was gone. The muscles in my neck relaxed. The chair turned into a bean bag. And the dentist went back to work. But not before he looked me in the eye and said in English, “Don’t worry, I’m going to fix this for you.”
There was something about the way he said it. There was care in there. And completely unexpectedly, something in me was disarmed. I couldn’t remember the last time someone looked me in the eye and offered to take some weight. Being single, divorced and feeling still so much like a foreigner every day, with a fat layer of Covid on top, I hadn’t realized till this moment how much I lug around with me all the time.
And this is where it got weird. Because now that I was relaxed, I realized how close the dentist was to me. Then he leaned in closer to work, and I could feel the heat of his body radiate out through his shirt and onto my cheek.
Jesus Karl, I thought, snap out of it.
But then I could smell his cologne. I don’t know what it was. But it smelled warm. And it took everything I had to not roll my head the last centimeter and rest it on his stomach. Fuzzy from the anesthetic and with my adrenaline exhausted, I was Jell-O. This feeling of being able to hand everything over, just for a moment… well, this is rare at the best of times. And had been almost non-existent in my 2020.
It was intimacy. Of a kind. But intimacy, nonetheless.
And it’s arrival was so unexpected and sudden, like a flash of lightning when there was no thunder. I wanted to cry, it felt so good. But I didn’t. And I didn’t roll my head the last centimeter either. Which made the moment suddenly hurt like finding an old friend I hadn’t seen in years and not being allowed to hug them.
While some of my lockdown behaviors were feeding the better side of me, lockdown had starved me too. And I’m sure the dentist in his own life. And the dental assistant in hers. And everybody else in Berlin.
I don’t agree at all with the anti-maskers of course. That’s just straight up lunacy. But there is nothing natural about what we’re all going through. And we all want it to be over. We are social beings. It’s in our DNA. It’s the reason that we evolved from wandering family units, into nomadic tribes, into townspeople, then city folk. We like to be around other people. We like to interact.
I miss being somewhere. With someone.
Wherever the place was that I’d kept all that locked up was now wide open. And these desires ran through my inner hallways like a zombie movie when the chains around the door handles break. Suddenly I was angry. Angry that I couldn’t hug my friends on dancefloors at 5am shirtless, that I couldn’t go home and see my family in Australia, that I’m not eating a meal with my friends in restaurants, that I’m doing my life over zoom calls, that I leave the house for a walk and my city is wasteland where there’s nowhere even to sit down. And that I can’t go to an airport because there’s nowhere to go.
I’m tired of yearning to be near people, and terrified of it at the same time.
Then the dentist was asking me to rinse. After that he inspected the filling. He nodded and smiled to himself. I’m glad he was happy with his work. Means I’m sure I’ll be too.
I got up out of the chair, wrung out from the rollercoaster of the last thirty minutes. I thanked the dentist and then headed out to the front desk and waited for his assistant to return. She perfunctorily issued my receipts. I was about to leave when she stopped me.
“Am Montag, wir haben frei entweder neun oder dreizehn Uhr.“ 9H or 13H on Monday? For what, I asked. The cleaning! I’d forgotten the whole reason I’d come here in the first place.
Given my luck with dreizehn, I opted for 9am. This time she didn’t ask and just handed me the reminder card.
So, dear reader, I’m guessing a lot of you are feeling the same way I am. This is one way we are all definitely alone, but together. Our circumstances might be different, but it’s all the same feelings. For the same reasons. The world finally has something in common. There’s got to be something good in that.
And the other plus? The teeth cleaning will be my first second date with a guy in a long time.
