English

Every night, the same horny thing happens down by the Hamburg docks. Come late evening, the night skins are being tautened over edge. Under whirring, murmuring, and avoidance pains, the little gingerbread house opens up. The Golden Pudel Club briefly digests, sighs, and pinches ist own earlobe.

To no avail, though. The nightly timelapae is bound to come. Tonight, too. It`s unavoidable, bet your bottom dollar. Behind the mountains of commonness the Poodles have been smoking now for 21 years, and smoke they did!

Widows, both typographical and otherwise, are riding their flesh warm and ready. That`s why the feeler-threads are hanging from the ceiling. That`s exactly why the music will be dangling in any minute now. We`ll get to that later.

First, the usual mix of gawpers and buyers of souls tries to bite off your balls. Nuts, no pun intended. The entire schedule. Plus the usual flick: slaves of their own loins and dromedaries get along nicely. From a sexual viewpoint surely the best thing that could happen to you. What else are wars there for?

Vice versa: reason, restraint, and all the rest of the wangling-through shit invented by Coca Cola truckdrivers with vodka-soaked tampons up their asses break in the vacuum air of the Golden Pudel Club. Invariably.

Near midnight already. If you happen to moonlight as a voodoo doll you`ll soon sense unfamiliar piercings in your back. What`s coming in there? What is it our senses are perceiving?

First, subtle string music rings out. And then all of a sudden two strings break and muffled rumbling`s roaring through the room: At last a DJane`s arrived with her dog-eared records -, causing a stir already, the tension´s easily to be compared with something like seven fat seagulls. Just for comparison`s sake.

And then it starts. Her deep wheelbarrow´s hanging from four rubber bands, spread out over the dancefloor. Here, in the centre and focal point of everything, desires and hopes of an entire generation get tied up, the hiccups generation. Oops, that was quite facile. Got to have it every once in a while. Anyway, sorry about that.

Back to the Golden Pudel Club! Where humanity´s small change´ll eternally rotate. Where the „milieu“ gives a new era its sweaty face. Where, yes, we have neither bananas nor globoli.

And they`re really back in, all of them. Auntin Tina, the lighthouse keeper, Lumpy, the Fairy-without-Vaseline, the Piggy Boys and the rest of the individualised crowd. In short: the human frontispiece, the better half of the half-title.

And for all of them their dancing is certainly a dream. But better than reality!

Come dawn, the solid-cored wooden building, once built from criminals` hipbones, shakes. Electricity falls off. The root or tonic keynote still booms in the taxi cabs, in the spits, and in the clouds of the timethieves.

Yes, the Golden Pudel Club. Did it again.

I could cry with joy, every time I encounter this black snow-lamb on the parish meadow.

Honestly.

Gereon Klug (32, `s something to do with the media) | Translated by Harry Rowohlt.