Chapter 1:

“Your friend is your needs answered.” - Khalil Gibran

By the time I had arrived in Berlin, Waleed had left. He was like that, Waleed, thinking something and then just doing it. I envied that about him. It had taken me weeks of rumination, retreating inside myself, untangling the issue from every perspective, until I got so tired of my own circular and self-referential thinking I just snapped, turned my brain off, and bought the ticket. Waleed got to that “brain off” part faster, almost too fast. But the thoughts and doubts for him just came later. I cut the nails on my right hand first, he started with the left.

My mother Yasmin took a photo of Waleed and I in California when we were in kindergarten, 1978. Waleed, bigger than me, paler than me, brown curly hair instead of my straight black, his chubby arm around me. We were the only two Lebanese kids in San Jose it felt like. It’s what brought us together in elementary school and apart by high school. The same happened with our parents, I lost count of the times my parents were told about this other Lebanese family living in town that they should meet.

In high school, I was on the soccer team, and Waleed wanted to be a rapper. He had a crew of baggily clothed misfits, one of every race, and used to smoke blunts during lunch break. I was listening to Depeche Mode, he listened to Too Short. I dated my first kiss for three years, he had a rotating romantic roster of, in his words, “big booty Latinas.”

Going to college at Berkeley had softened my straight edge. I went often to the Amoeba Music record store on Telegraph Ave to pick up weed and vinyls. The facade of the store was circumscribed with a large, painted rainbow, and the name of the store was written slowly, neon letter by neon letter, each letter encased in a dancing star. Every time I entered Amoeba my eyes panicked with an excess of options, the only blank space belonging to the floor and the ceiling, the John Soane Museum of Berkley. 

After a year of patronage the staff introduced me to a secondary checkout in the back of the store where River, a middle-aged man who always had on clear, thick, rectangular glasses and a rotating assortment of Grateful Dead T-shirts, sold weed to selected regulars. River was a modern day hippie capitalist, selling records while moonlighting as a weed merchant and trip shaman. He only sold hydroponic neatly packaged in sealed baggies, a clean and discrete businessman.

On one of my usual runs in the spring semester of sophomore year, I ran into Waleed at the secondary checkout. He had gotten skinnier since high school, wearing circular, gold rimmed, John Lennon-type shades with a navy Champion sweater. On the sweater was a collage of recycled letters from garments past, spelling ‘Arabz wit Appetitez.’ It had the feeling of a Hollywood ransom note. Waleed studied me back with raised eyebrows. I could have avoided this awkward exchange if I had seen him first. 

“Ramzi?”

He looked at the vinyl I was buying.

“Aphex Twin?”

Then hawk-like at the careless bulge in my left pocket. 

“Smokin’ doinks?”

He put his glasses up, then down, and then back up again. 

“Life moves pretty fast.” 

River, tactful as ever, gave the old acquaintances some space.  He mumbled something about a new Lijadu Sisters record that had to be sorted and faded away. I gave Waleed the summary - I was studying economics at UC Berkeley, it was going okay, and my ill fated attempt at a long distance relationship had gone as the critics predicted. 

“She was too skinny for you anyways,” Waleed said with a sly smile. 

Old feelings bubbled up. “I was the skinny one, she’s got a d-lineman now. Anyways - how’s school?” 

“Khalas, then came the weed huh.”

Waleed was studying sociology at SF State, interning at a record label named Ubiquity Records, and still “down bad with the a-thicc-tion,” what he called his pursuit of curvy women. He was in town to meet with an up-and-coming trip-hop producer he liked, and had heard the new Aphex Twin record in the studio. 

“My brotha,” he told me. “This is the sound of Europe.” 

…

At the Tegel Airport in Berlin, the movement of the crowds directed me efficiently from point to point, arrival gate to passport control to baggage claim to customs to exit. I couldn’t read the signs, but if you look at Germans hard enough you can always tell where they are going. The gears of the machine pushed me along, I took orders well, and I found myself on a fall Friday in October of 1995 in the city of Berlin, which Waleed had designated “the Paris of Detroit.” With Waleed, I often had to squint to understand. 

My jetlag from the nine hour difference and the hazy, soft light gave the city a dreamlike quality. I was disoriented by the goodbyes and hellos as people onboarded, offboarded, and waited, my eyes strained by the vibrance of the trees. There was a richness to autumn here that made California feel plain. It felt like the first time I had seen real seasons, the spectrum of what a leaf could be, a flame frame by frame. 

Elsewhere in the horizon, the main airport building jutted out, angular concrete slabs with identical blue windows rippling in repetition. Closer to me was a billboard with a smiling German family, ‘Herzlich Wilkommen in Berlin - Welcome to Berlin.’ On it I saw the time in 24 hour units, 14:53, and the weather in Celsius, 10 degrees. In preparation for my trip, I had discovered a pattern of converting Fahrenheit to Celsius. 10 degrees Celsius became 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and though the knowledge was useless it made me more comfortable somehow. 

I searched for a taxi and joined a civilized queue. In Beirut, a line would resemble the dots of a scatter plot, and the background noise would be the sounds of a bazaar. The yellow sun would ooze, and men in camo would be patrolling with heavy guns. I always felt like they stared at me a bit longer than the others, my walk and my clothes betraying foreign sympathies. I never looked away first. Here in Berlin though, nobody was looking besides me.

Waleed had told me Berlin was a diverse city, but I saw mostly white people in line with me. The white people looked different here, more solid somehow, sharper, harder. More German I guess. Andrei, my Russian friend at Berkeley, had told me once that there was a saying in Russia that if you saw a person smiling on the street they were either crazy or American. Nobody was smiling in this line, with one exception: a heavy set Arab looking woman in a red hijab, with three kids clamoring for her attention.

On closer inspection, the woman seemed Turkish rather than Arab, the hijab fitting tighter, colorful silk with intricate flowers. Around her neck was the nazar, a silver amulet with a blue eye in its center, meant for warding off the evil eye, the jealous stare of others. I had a gold necklace around me from my mother with a similar purpose, but the symbol on my necklace was the hamsa, an eye encased in an upside down hand. My dad had always disliked the gold I wore, citing Islamic conventions, but my mother who was Druze didn’t pay any attention. “This is America,” she said. “Not Beirut.” 

The Turkish woman was managing her children elegantly, distracting one kid with a toy, sitting down the second, and picking up the third. The child with the toy transitioned from crying to smiling so quickly I felt a sort of whiplash. But this random woman moving through the world with lightness and grace reminded me of ancient things I felt but couldn’t remember. 

…

After Amoeba, the rhythms of Waleed and I intersected more. Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks meant finding somewhere to be that wasn’t our house. Our third place, our Terabithia, was a hidden nook in the Guadalupe River Park. If you went down the slopes of the creek, you would find a cave with a climbing wall, an uninterrupted set of holds canvassing the interior. That was where Waleed and I got to know each other again - maybe we were also forgiving each other, or life, for the years spent apart. 

By the summer of 1995, Waleed and I had graduated from college - we were home for the summer, bright but lacking direction. I was a counselor at a soccer camp and Waleed worked as a barista at Peet’s Coffee and Tea. Waleed had taken his job with a misguided logical leap: he thought because he loved coffee, he would love making it. When he was fired after three weeks of consistent apathy, he told me, with a solemn note to his voice, “It was written.” 

“What’s your plan?” I asked. Waleed always had a plan, or rather, a scheme. I half expected him to set up a company, Waleed Solutions Inc, with the tagline, ‘We solve problems.’

“The holy spirit beckons me to Europe,” Waleed said, again with that same grave tone.

I laughed and made the sign of the cross. Waleed, Christian in theory, Rastafarian in practice. “Allah giveth and Allah taketh.”

“Ramzi - come with me. The nest is done. It’s fly or die.” 

“You can’t be serious.”

“Think about it. Right now we have no plans, no girlfriends, no jobs. This is it. This is it.” 

I had entertained many of Waleed’s half baked daydreams and abstract romantic notions, but this one had consequences. I remembered Waleed’s most recent scheme, flipping Beanie Babies for a profit. The man had more ideas each day than clean clothes. “First, I have a job. Second, if we don’t have plans we should make plans. Moving won’t solve anything.” I could hear my father in me, telling me, ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss.’ I didn’t like that. 

“Suit yourself,” he said. “I’m going to do it.” 

Over the next few weeks, I followed Waleed’s progress with a mix of curiosity and disbelief. He was serious - he kept repeating to himself, “How do you eat an elephant? Piece by piece.” I couldn’t help but support him when I saw his sincerity. I called my cousin in London to ask about the visa process for Americans. But Waleed had set his eyes on a different city I had no connection to: Berlin. He was aiming for targets I couldn’t see. 

When I heard Berlin, I remembered the Wall coming down in ‘89, NBC reporting on democracy’s victory over communism. Waleed had surveyed every music contact he knew, and the consensus was that for a young artist, Berlin was the place to be. It was a hotbed for electronic music and far more affordable than other European capitals like London or Paris. Eric, Waleed’s former co-worker from Ubiquity, had recently visited, and told him, “It’s a tabula rasa over there man. New beginnings. And the girls… there’s types of hot I ain’t even seen before. Call my palate expanded man.” 

By early July, Waleed had a one way ticket to Berlin, a hostel in the district of Kreuzberg, and the remainder of his cash converted to Deutschmarks. I came with Waleed and his family to the airport - his father Farez, a bespectacled professor and intellectual, his mother Laila, a worried housewife, and his younger sister Nour, a chubby, friendly, 10 year old. I could feel on the car ride to San Francisco that Waleed’s parents had differing opinions about his journey. Waleed was mostly silent, looking out the window, and Nour was babbling.

At the departure gate, Waleed gave us all big hugs, the last one for me. He looked me in the eye. “Your heart knows the way. Your heart knows the way.” I would hate and miss these clichés he repeated twice, how easily he could say and do grand things. “Habibi,” I said, and gave him a full hug back. Waleed took his suitcase and trudged towards the departure gate, walking backwards and waving before turning and committing. He left, I stayed, and regret washed over me.  

… 

My turn was up and a cream colored Mercedes met me with a small, understated hump that just read “Taxi.” If this was New York, the taxi light would be the length of the roof, bright ads all across hawking lingerie or cigarettes. I imagined the grocery stores in Berlin to be 1984-esque, white cartons labeled with a black ‘Milk.’ 

The driver stepped outside the taxi, a middle aged German man with a wide, yellow, smoker’s smile. He looked just shady enough to trust, and introduced himself as Arnold, the “a” harsher than I was capable of and the “r” silent. “Wohin?” he asked me.

“53 Planufer Street. Kreuzberg.”

“You are not in Kansas, Dorothy,” he told me, chuckling with his thick German accent. “Planufer Straße 53.” I had forgotten that the number was after the street in Berlin, Waleed had mentioned it in one of his infrequent letters. Arnold’s correction annoyed me but I liked the Wizard of Oz packaging, throwing my luggage and backpack in the trunk and putting on headphones. 

With a loud click my cassette started, New Order’s Movement spilling into the blur of green and concrete. We exited the airport area directly and quickly, entering a grey stretch of industrial buildings past their salad days. As we continued the buildings grew residential, adding colors, slopes, windows, and balconies, answering needs of a higher order. 

Arnold followed a blue sign with white lettering, the number 100 paired with a symbol of a window interrupted by a see-saw. I had my first look at the famed German Autobahn. It felt straighter than the California highways, less frills, more matter of fact. The only logos I saw were the occasional Volkswagens and Mercedes. Space was cheap, the cars generous. As the Autobahn cut low to the ground, it separated two different cities in the middle of a conversation. On my right, office buildings, glass, the occasional neon, fragments of an older America. To my left, buildings like window blinds, steel cranes in overpopulation. 

Arnold took an exit, and as the off-ramp narrowed, concrete walls covered the open view the Autobahn had afforded. The graffiti per capita increased, and our car slowed to a stop, a city paved by the evening sun. It was cold but I couldn’t help myself, I rolled the window down and stuck my head out, dog like. I wanted to yell jubilant screams in my new aloneness, my only friend the city. Arnold motioned to me and I wondered if I was in trouble - I made available an ear. “Stadtluft macht frei,” he said. “City air makes you free.” Arnold gave me a little cackle and I reminded myself to write that down later, I liked it.

In the city, Arnold moved smoothly, the contours of the roads etched into his brain. This city had layers. The bikers, the buses, the dogs, the pedestrians, moving parts connected by strings, our car now part of this kinetic system. There were kiosks, kebabs, housing blocks, all mixed together, signs and slogans I had never seen Tetris-ed together with curved street lamps and traffic lights. The Autobahn was the Germany of my imagination, but this was the bazaar - the car went from driving to strolling, a buzz in the evening air yet also a tension. 

We came to a stop at a green, ripped up couch on the street, the river on one side and my temporary home on the other. Two boys that couldn’t have been older than 18 were on the couch, sharing a few beers and cigarettes. Arnold helped me with my suitcase, and just before he got into his car again, he looked at me and said, “Hasta la vista. Baby.” This time it was Terminator 2.