Two Brothers

Hot Hot Hot! Berlin, 1923

EVERYBODY CAME TO the Joplin.

High life. Low life. Good guys. Bad guys.

Plenty of beauties, plenty of beasts.

From day one the place simply throbbed with easy money, booze, sex, drugs and jazz.

The sex and the drugs were supplied principally by Kurt’s friend Helmut the ‘queer pimp’, whom Wolfgang now discovered dealt in narcotics as well as prostitutes.

He regularly offered Wolfgang both.

‘Take your pick,’ Helmut loved to say expansively, pointing out various exquisite young girls (and boys) who were club regulars and whom Wolfgang had no idea were prostitutes. ‘Take two and make yourself a sandwich. Don’t worry, they’re all clean as whistles. Six months ago they were at finishing schools; now, I’m afraid, Daddy’s poor and growing girls and boys must eat.’

Wolfgang politely declined the offer of sex but he was happy to accept the occasional chemical stimulant. They were long nights and the trumpet is a demanding task master.

He didn’t tell Frieda of course. But Frieda wasn’t there and he didn’t have to play by her rules. Not at the club.

He was after all a jazz man. Jazz men didn’t play by anybody’s rules. That was the point. A little cocaine with your champagne? A puff of something dreamy to chase along the single malt? Why not? How could a man say no?

And if, as the nights went by, he found himself chatting more and more to Katharina between sets, so what? Was it a crime? He liked her. And it wasn’t just because she was beautiful, although that didn’t hurt. Or that she was intriguing and enigmatic.

Fascinating even.

Wolfgang had met lots of fascinating girls.

Lots of girls who did the same impression of a cold-eyed sultry vamp, so popular in the movies.

The point was he really did like her.

She was interested in the same things he was, equally inspired and excited by them. Not just jazz either, but all kinds of art. When Katharina talked about art, her face became animated and her eyes started to sparkle. All that carefully posed haughtiness evaporated and it became clear that her world-weary indifference was just a youthful pretension and she was still a gauche teenager at heart.

She wanted to be an actress of course. German film studios were Hollywood’s only real rivals and what beautiful young Berlin girl didn’t want to be part of the action? But unlike most of those girls, she didn’t just dream of stardom. She loved theatre as much as the movies and Wolfgang was delighted to discover that she had been at many of the same performances that he and Frieda had seen on their occasional, precious evenings out.

‘You like Piscator?’ Wolfgang asked during one of their first serious chats.

‘Yes, and I’ve met him too. I waited for him at the Volksbühne stage door after he did The Lower Depths.’

‘You like Gorky too?’

‘Of course I do! Why wouldn’t I like him? Nobody writes like the Russians. He’s a genius, particularly when Piscator does him.’

In fact, to Wolfgang’s embarrassment, he soon discovered that Katharina was far better read and versed in the new Expressionist theatre than he was. She had travelled all the way to Munich to see Drums In The Night, the first play from a new writer called Brecht whom Wolfgang had not even heard of.

Katharina always knew what exciting Berlin personalities were in the house each night.

‘Guess what,’ she’d say with excitement, squeezing herself into the tiny band room behind the stage, oblivious to the fact that the boys were stripped to their vests and shorts trying to cool down between brackets. ‘Herwarth Walden’s in!’

‘Herbert who?’ was the general reaction from the assembled musicians. It usually was, when Katharina announced that she had spotted some celebrated figure of the avant garde.

But Wolfgang always knew exactly who she meant.

‘My God,’ he said, peering out through the beaded curtain, ‘he’s talking to Dorf.’

‘Probably selling him a painting.’

‘The publisher of Der Sturm is listening to my band,’ Wolfgang exclaimed. ‘That is amazing.’

‘Hey, Wolf baby,’ a deep, heavily tinged American voice interjected, ‘be cool. Whoever the gentleman is, he eats and he shits just like everybody else do. And this ain’t your band by the way. We’re a collective and don’t you forget it.’

Thomas ‘Uncle Tom’ Taylor was one of the numerous American schwarz musicians who had found life easier, and work more plentiful, in the fevered melting pot of post-war Berlin than they had in the segregated theatres and bars of their own cities. Like most of them he spoke good German with a Mississippi twang.

‘We may be your collective,’ Tom went on, ‘I admit that, but I ain’t nobody’s nigger. Who is this Waldorf cat anyway?’

‘Walden, Tom,’ Wolfgang corrected. ‘He’s not a salad, he’s the Godfather of Berlin Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism, Magic Realism…’

‘Damn! That cat loves an ism!’

‘That cat’s been painted by Oskar Kokoschka.’

‘Well, excuse my ignorance, sir!’ Tom laughed. ‘And by the way, if Oskar Kokoschka’s a real name I’d like to shake the guy’s parents’ hand.’

Just then Kurt appeared standing halfway through the beaded curtain, a string of it across his face, swaying noticeably. Katharina stared at him, an expression of irritation, even contempt, crossing her features, which she made no effort to disguise.

‘This band is hot!’ Kurt shouted. ‘Hot hot hot!’

Kurt was getting drunker earlier and using more drugs. Katharina had confided to Wolfgang that he had taken to injecting his cocaine rather than snorting it.

‘It’s disgusting,’ she said. ‘Last night he did it in his balls. Can you imagine? In front of me. Says it gives an exceptional high. Personally I don’t think any thrill is worth that much loss of dignity.’

Kurt was in an exultant mood.

‘Great opening set, you guys!’ he slurred. ‘I loved it, I more than loved it, I adored it, I lived it, it spoke to my soul.’

Katharina slipped away while Kurt continued to witter on.

‘You were out there, boys. Solid gone. Let me tell you, I know jazz and that was jazz, baby.’

Kurt was by nature a talkative man and cocaine made him insanely verbose. He spewed words. They tumbled out on top of each other in a vomit of extravagant praise. It was as if he was saying words side by side as well as end to end. It made Wolfgang sad to hear him. The best boss he ever had was becoming a jerk.

He began to usher Kurt out of the room. Had he not done so, Kurt probably would have gone on all night, oblivious to time.

‘Got to get ourselves together, Kurt,’ he said. ‘Have to play the next bracket, that’s why you pay us.’

‘Yeah!… That’s right! Get ready! For the next bracket!’ Kurt shouted as if continuing with the evening’s performance was some brilliant and incisively original idea. ‘That’s what I like to hear. And make it hot hot hot!’

As the ridiculously youthful figure stumbled away, Wenke the clarinet player snorted in contempt. Wenke was a brilliant instrumentalist but a dark and brooding man, permanently damaged by four years in the trenches. ‘Little bourgeois prick,’ he snarled. ‘We’ll have him hanging from a lamp-post one of these days, when the revolution comes. The whole pack of them make me sick. Boys in lipstick, girls with their breasts showing through their dresses. Berlin’s turning into a cesspit.’

‘Don’t you run Berlin down in front of me, Wenke,’ Tom Taylor said with a deep friendly laugh, while chugging at a quarter of Bourbon that he kept in the breast pocket of his dinner jacket. ‘I love Berlin, ’cos ya know what? Right here in this town Wolfgang’s the nigger, not me! Ain’t that the strangest thing? Back in the States I was a nigger every day of my life but not here! I finally found a city where they hate someone worse than they hate a black man and I say hallelujah to the Jews.’

‘You just let a gang of Stahlhelm find you fucking a German girl, Tom,’ Wolfgang observed, ‘and you’ll soon find out who’s the nigger.’

‘Well, they ain’t going to find me, Wolf, are they?’ Tom laughed, ‘because I ain’t about to invite no audience in to watch. Not that they wouldn’t get one hell of a lesson in humping!’ he added, taking another slug of his whisky, ‘American style, slow and easy, like la-a-azy blues.’

Wilhelm the sax player interjected, a man whose face was caked in make-up and who wore a green carnation on his lapel.

‘Well, speaking as one of Wenke’s boys in lipstick, if you ever tire of working your way through our city’s charming show girls, Tom, don’t hesitate to call me, I’d love to try a bit of schwarz myself.’

‘I surely will remember that, Fräulein.’ Tom laughed. ‘You can expect that call just as soon as hell freezes over.’

‘You’re a bunch of decadent cunts,’ Wenke grumbled.

‘Of course we are!’ Wolfgang shouted. ‘We’re jazz men! Being decadent cunts is our job description. Now come on, as the boss says, time to go ape, Daddy!’

Halfway through the second bracket Wolfgang saw Katharina slip away. Looking out from behind the dome of his trumpet he watched as she headed for the doorway with a man. A big producer from the UFA film studios whom Katharina had introduced Wolfgang to briefly the night before. A great, swaggering, sweating, arrogant middle-aged movie guy.

It was her business of course.

Certainly none of his.

No need to feel jealous.

She was just a friend.

But as Katharina and her film producer disappeared together, the man’s plump, bejewelled hand placed proprietorially upon Katharina’s slim, naked back, Wolfgang was shocked to realize just how jealous he was.