Danse Macabre (eBook)

J.T. Tucker (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
320 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-9925965-1-9 (ISBN)

Infos

The life and times of cabaret dancer, Anita Berber, in Jazz Age Berlin.

Poet and novelist

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A shocking account of the life and times of naked cabaret dancer and film actress, Anita Berber, an icon of Jazz Agw Berlin. Anita was the most provocative personality in decadent Berlin, at a time of complete societal collapse. Incidents like the Spanish flu and the Gret Inflation that rendered the curr3ncy without value had turned the city into a fever dream of out of control behavior. And Anita was at the forefront of the madness, a New Woman: chic, fearless, half-mad, and dangerous in the extreme. This account is well-researched and filled with her scandalous relationships, including many of the love affairs with people like Marlene Dietrich and Lya de Putti. After years of drug addiction, and general abuse, Anita collapsed on her final tour in the mideast, and died at the age of 29. She was buried in a pauper's grave in Berlin in 1928.

Textauszug

CHAPTER 2

Sacred Monster

It was in the autumn, about a year after the Armistice. I was an underage trick boy, a porcelain dolly with rouged cheeks and an Eton haircut, and Anita Berber was on her way to becoming the most famously depraved woman on the continent. She was just twenty years old, a naked dancer and film actress, and recently married for who knows what reason to a gay scriptwriter named Eberhard von Nathusius. You didn’t hear much about Eberhard, but you heard a lot about Anita the dope fiend, the predatory lesbian and brutal domme. Along with a retinue of avant-garde nobodies and a thug or two for protection, she went about town sometimes half-dressed and sometimes not dressed at all. Onstage and off, her nature was morbid and violent. Earlier in the year, on tour in Vienna, she’d beaten one of her sex slaves so severely the woman had to be hospitalized. The possibility that Anita might sooner or later wind up killing someone only added to her allure. By the autumn of 1919, then, you could hardly open a newspaper or magazine without coming across a story about Anita Berber, the new century’s New Woman: chic, fearless, half-mad, and dangerous in the extreme.

And I was just a street kid, a petty thief and hustler who sold blowjobs and sometimes my ass. I shared a filthy room in the Friedrichstadt with two other trick boys, but I hustled by myself in a rundown arcade called the Passage, and once in awhile I wandered over to one of the back streets near the Spree. That’s where I was late one night when Anita came walking out of a drag club in a sable coat and green high heels and nothing else. You could see it was nothing else because she hadn’t even bothered to close the coat. I was standing in a doorway not ten feet away, dressed like a schoolboy in short pants and a sailor’s blouse. Near-sighted Anita came to a stop and squinted to bring me into focus. There she was, shrouded in river mist – Berlin’s wild child, slender and ghostly pale, with short ginger-colored hair and a sneery sullen mouth. I was starstruck, dazzled.

“Are you waiting for someone, kid?” she asked.

“No.”

“You have a pimp?”

When I shook my head no, she told me to stay where I was – “Don’t you dare move!” – and then she click clicked over to me in her shiny spike heels and patted me down, frisking me like a cop. Up close, she was a thrilling glamour girl with arsenic-green eyeshadow and a smear of crimson lipstick. Leaning over for the frisk, her pointy tits swung out of her coat and the dark nipples grazed my shirtfront. I had a packet of Rothmans in my back pocket, along with a brass cigarette lighter I’d stolen from a shop somewhere. She took the lighter and the cigarettes and all of my money, which wasn’t much, and then stepped back a pace or two and flicked a glance at my crotch. The pat-down had stiffened my penis.

“Lose the hard-on,” she said.

Which I did, and quickly. I felt like the best little boy in the world. Teacher’s pet.

“Don’t look so pleased with yourself,” Anita said. “Oh, and now you’re giving me big sad eyes? You’re quite the actress, you little shit.”

We were in a narrow alley, a dank alley somewhere in the vicinity of Spittelmarkt. I remember a red light blinking on and off over the door of the drag club, and now that I remember that red light, I remember the door swinging open and spilling out honkytonk music and a pride of pretty young women dressed as pretty young men. The butchest among them pointed her walking stick at me and said to Anita, “Is he giving you trouble?”

“This little pussy? No, she’s harmless.”

One of the girls, drunk, laughing, said, “I’ll fuck that pussy right now. Anyone dare me?”

Anita said, “Nobody’s fucking anyone. Get going, all of you.”

As the girls in their trousers and painted-on mustaches wandered off, Anita lit up one of my cigarettes and asked me how old I was. “Wie alt bist du denn?”

Out of habit I lied and took two years off my age and told her I was fourteen.

“You have a name?”

“Max Becker,” I said. Which was also a lie. My surname was Bauer. Becker was the alias I used with cops.

“Maxine would suit you better. So where do you live, Fraulein?”

“On Alte Jakob. Down near the Star Kino.”

“That’s a blowjob palace. How convenient for you. What’s your mama think of her precious boy?”

“I haven’t seen her since the war. I don’t know where she is.”

“What about your papa?”

“They killed him in France.”

“They killed a lot of them in France.. That doesn’t make you special.” She took another drag on her cigarette and exhaled a plume of bluish smoke. “So tell me, darling – what are you good for, exactly?”

“I don’t know. Whatever you want, I guess.”

“Okay, liebchen. Pull down your shorts and turn around. Let me see your ass.”

I dropped my shorts and underpants and then turned and arched my back, thrusting out my rear end. If memory serves, I even wiggled my bottom, as I would have with a trick. When I glanced over my shoulder, Anita gave me a thin smile and said, “Okay, Poodle – let’s take a ride.”

The ride was parked across the street from the alley – a dark green Pierce Arrow, about as long as a canal barge and buffed and polished to a high sheen. As we approached, a toothless old queen in a chauffeur’s duster doffed his cap and opened the rear door. Anita told him to drive around for awhile – “Just kill some time, Fritzi” – and then folded herself into the car, flashing her legs all the way up to the tenderloin. Once she was out of sight, the old man shot me a filthy look and muttered something beneath his breath. I had one foot on the running board. The filthy look, its intensity, startled me and made me hesitate.

Inside the car, Anita had flung off her coat and was bent over, naked, snuffling cocaine out of a silver brooch. The rush snapped her head back and straightened her spine. She was sitting almost sidesaddle, legs crossed, a high heel dangling off her painted toes. Her slim body was flawless and so white she seemed bathed in light.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said softly. “Hop in.”

Off we went, following the curve of the Spree through a no man’s land of junkyards and derelict warehouses. It was about two in the morning and warm, misty. False spring in the middle of autumn. Anita was sitting to my left, as unselfconscious in her nakedness as a child or a lunatic.

Coked up and fidgeting, waving an unlit cigarette in the air, she started bitching about a dance critic who’d given her a bad review in Berliner Leben. The bitching was venomous and it went on for quite awhile. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched her little tits quiver in response to the vagaries of the poorly maintained road. If she’d been a bustier girl, she’d have had to hold onto her breasts. I was forming that image in my mind when she suddenly wheeled around and glared at me, fuming.

“Are you blind? Can’t you see I need a light? If you can’t take care of something as simple as lighting my cigarettes, what are you doing here? You should have been ready to light me up before I even had a cig in my hand. You need to anticipate things. Otherwise you’re completely fucking useless.”

In the rear view mirror, the old man’s eyes connected with mine. He grinned, showing me his gums, and then silently mouthed the word useless.

“Fuck you, shitheel,” I said.

Anita went, “What? What’d you say?”

“I was talking to that shitheel up front. The prick keeps making faces at me.”

“Fritzi, pull over,” Anita said.

The big car lurched onto the shoulder of the road and came to a stop. We were miles from anywhere. Moonless, starless, pitch black night, and now it was beginning to rain.

“Get out,” Anita told me. Calmly, icily. It put me into a panic.

“Shit, really? You’re throwing me out like this? I don’t even know where we are. And look, it’s raining. This isn’t fair! How was I supposed to light your cigarette when you took my lighter? You took my fucking cigarettes, too. By the way, would you mind if I had one?”

To this day, I’m still not sure why I spoke to Anita like that. It was stupid bravado and I regretted the words the moment I said them. Fritzi was so provoked by my insolence that he couldn’t contain himself. Twisting around, he jabbed a finger at me and shouted, “Raus, you b-b-bastard! Raus!”

If Fritzi’s temper tantrum surprised me, Anita’s reaction surprised me even more. First she kicked the back of his seat, hard enough to jolt him, and then she leaned forward, swatted his silly cap off his head, and rapped her knuckles on his skull.

“You’re not part of this...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 31.8.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Historische Romane
• ISBN-13: 979-8-9925965-1-9 / 9798992596519