The Berghain Photographer (Berlin Mayhem, Part 1)

The first thing I noticed about him was the deep shadow cast by his dick. It looked perfect, balanced and heavy, its upper curve smiling at me from across the backroom. I was already on my knees, drunk and dirty, sucking a mediocre dick I’d picked up on the dance floor. The techno hit so hard it knocked the standards right out of me.

The shadow came and went, hidden by passing legs, most of them hairy, but not all. Jeans and black shorts dropped to the ankles in every corner. Tits and dicks, separate or together. Someone on his knees eating pussy with abandon. The shadow reappeared, smiling at me again.

I must have stopped blowing him because the guy pushed on my head, shoving his dick far enough that his pubes caught on my teeth, his big belly cushioning my forehead. I gagged and pulled back, just in time for somebody else to kneel beside me and pick up the slack. Good.

I would’ve watched longer, entranced by the waving motion of wet lips working a shaft, sliding on my own spit, but that shadow smile almost winked at me.

The guy himself was now leaning against a wall, blond and shirtless against the concrete like a beacon, beautiful dick catching the red light. I made my way across the darkroom, struggling to zip up my jeans, hoping my breath smelled better than that dick tasted. I’ve been here so long I can’t remember the last time I brushed my teeth.

He watched me approach, grabbed his dick, and lightly stroked it.

“Are you gonna get on your knees for me, too?” he asked when I reached him. Shouted, really, his voice drowned by the industrial noise, naked beats endlessly layered one on top of the other.

His chest was glorious, fit but not muscular. The kind of guy who took care of his body but didn’t spend hours at the gym. But again, no one has the energy to pump iron after thirty-six hours at Berghain.

“I was gonna ask your name first, actually. But your dick does look amazing.”

“What about yours?” he said, reaching to unzip me. I leaned against the wall next to him and let him take me out, his sweaty hands digging for my balls, opening the whole package. “Camera ready.”

He pinned me against the rough wall to kiss me, his pecs touching me, his whole body pressing against mine. I grabbed his ass and hugged him closer, my dick throbbing against his.

“Come,” he said, taking my hand. “Let’s dance. There’s better places here to fuck.”

“What’s that book? I don’t remember this.”

G shakes a thin volume at me. He’s clearing the one shelf we have in the living room, if we can call it that, to make space for baby things. Mountains of baby things. Shades of pink threatening to take over our lives, one room at a time. Out with board games and the typewriter Lego set, in with animal-shaped teethers and dream bunnies. Whatever that furry, pink atrocity is.

In an ideal world, all of it would go into the baby’s room, minus a few tasteful storybooks to say that yes, I am a cool dad. In our current, all-too-real world, we’re renovating the whole house ourselves while caring for an infant. Our bed is in the kitchen, between the cot and the counter. We make it work. Somehow it feels like we’re twenty-two again, fucking like rabbits every chance we get.

“Sure you do,” I say, looking up. Our daughter eats like a troll and I’m covered in formula. “It’s even signed to you.”

He turns the cover, a photograph of a guy in the process of taking off his jeans, his speedo front and center, taking up half the frame. It always felt to me like an invitation.

“Kiss from Nikos, to G. Lose yourself in the excess,” G reads, puzzled. “Nikos?”

“Come on. It’s the photographer I met at Berghain, the day after winter Snax. I went back with David while you spent the afternoon at Boiler. You know, fucking Ky—”

“I remember that part,” he cuts me off. “So you bought his book and had it signed to me?”

“Can’t one thing be both a memento and a nice birthday present?” I smile.

“These are good,” he says, sitting down to sift through the photographs. “Feels like we’re right there with him. Doing lines in Berlin, fucking at the afterparty. Look at that dick!”

The main floor swallowed us whole. Nikos led me straight to the center, weaving through the dancing crowd, one with the beat. It was so loud it felt like sacrificing my eardrums to the moment, his beautiful chest catching the strobe in slices. I couldn’t stop touching it, touching him.

He danced with his whole body, loose-limbed but present. He danced with his eyes open, taking in everything around him. The way I moved my arms over my head, the trimmed hair in my armpits, the girls dancing around us into oblivion, as bare-chested as we were. Long black hair hitting my face, someone spilling a drink on us.

We danced pressed together, his mouth finding my neck between beats. It almost felt like a cleanse after the sheer amount of fucking I’d done a few hours before in that very space. He turned me around so my back was against his chest, his arms crossed over me, his hard-on obvious against my ass through two layers of denim. We swayed like that for a while, ignoring the pulsating rhythm, anonymous but held, him breathing into my ear, both of us slick with other people’s sweat.

I spun around and kissed him properly, hard, one hand on the back of his neck. The bass moved through the floor and up through both of us, sending droplets of sweat flying. When we broke apart he was grinning, pupils blown wide, and he shouted something I couldn’t hear. I leaned in. He shouted it again, right against my ear.

“Follow me,” he said, taking my hand before disappearing into a sea of skin and leather.

“We should go back.”

“What?” I say, putting the bottle down again.

“Snax. Berlin. We should go back.”

G is fully immersed in Nikos’s photography book, losing himself in the pictures. I’d go back in a heartbeat, but I’m holding a living, breathing obstacle to that particular side quest. The way she eats, she might as well guard a bridge.

“I feel like we know him,” he says, sitting next to me. He holds the book open, struck by a picture. Tattoos, pearl necklace. Red lipstick, muscled frame cinched into a black corset. “Did he take your picture?”

“Did you see me in the book?”

“Not yet, but it wouldn’t be the first time you ended up in one.”

“Are you jealous?”

“Am I ever?” he says, flipping another page.

“He did not. We just danced and fucked upstairs at Panorama. You know you can’t take pictures inside Berghain.”

“Pose for me.”

I laugh. “Come on.”

“I’m serious.”

He takes our satiated, sleeping daughter and disappears into the kitchen. By the time he’s back with his phone, he’s already cued up my favorite Jennifer Cardini set on the sound system. The first notes are blasting through the house.

“Come on. Dance. Remember she played at Snax? The red light, all those people fucking.”

“You were so high you thought we were in purgatory.”

“Who says we weren’t?” he says, taking off my shirt.

That set always gets me. The bass drops when I close my eyes and I’m there, climbing the stairs from Berghain to Panorama Bar.

The music carried me step after step, beat for beat, my eyes on his toned ass. The industrial noise ebbed and flowed into a more melodic house, looped voices replacing stark reverbs, Chicago house welcoming me into heaven with its disco-inflected grooves.

Panorama was packed to the literal rafters with Sunday afternoon ravers, every single one of us praying to the turntables. The vibe was less darkly sexual up here, and it just made me want him more.

As we swerved right around a group, skirting the dance floor, Nikos stopped to talk with a tall, beautiful girl. She flicked her long ponytail and laughed at whatever he told her before he dragged me forward.

He climbed in first and pulled me up after him into one of the recessed niches lining the wall, levitating two or three feet off the floor like hollowed-out, abandoned subwoofers. From up there we were above the current, floating in the harsh disco beats as the crowd streamed past below us. People cutting around the edge of the dance floor to reach the back bar, a whole parched congregation. Heads and shoulders and raised arms. Faces caught in the light for a second, then gone. Keys up nostrils without breaking stride. Someone crying and laughing at the same time, heavy mascara dripping down their face.

While we were watching them, lost in the music, Nikos undressed me. He unzipped my jeans and pushed them down past my knees. When they caught on my shoes he took those, too, throwing my beat-up black Converses behind me. By the time he’d smelled my socks and thrown them aside, too, my dick was begging to be freed.

He started playing with my dick, shirtless but otherwise still dressed, while I was stark naked in Panorama. He spat in his hand and grabbed my dick, his slick palm sending shivers all the way up my spine.

He knew what he was doing. Slow, then slower, his thumb finding the head on every upstroke, dragging it out until I was pushing up into his fist for more and he was making me wait. His other arm held me pinned down, teasing my pierced nipple, so I had nowhere to go and nothing to do but take it. The bass came up through the niche, from above and below and everywhere at the same time, and into both of us. He spat on my dick again and squeezed it as he moved, my moans lost to the music.

The congregation streamed by, some of them dead set on their destination, some of them looking, smiling, watching my naked body and hard cock as a Greek stranger was slowly taking me apart. I closed my eyes and gave in to the feeling, to the music, to his hands on me.

“Nikos, what’s up?”

“Oh, Gloria, Stan, what’s up babes?” Nikos said as I opened my eyes.

Two people had stopped by our niche and were now making small talk with Nikos, who was still holding my dick. I couldn’t believe it.

“Haven’t seen you since the expo. How did it go?”

“Amazing,” Nikos said. “The book should be published soon. So excited.”

“Congrats, that’s huge,” Gloria said, her tiny breasts visible behind a mesh top, her incredible mane of red curls falling over her tattooed shoulders. “And that’s huge, too. Who’s your friend? Are you gonna introduce us or what?”

“Quentin,” I yelled, not quite believing what was happening. Nikos gripped my dick harder and stroked it down, pulling the foreskin as far as he could, as if to expose every inch of me. “I’d get up to say hi, but…”

She laughed and grabbed my big toe, pulling on it.

“No worries. When you’re tired of his fisherman hands,” she said with a wink, “come find me.”

“And don’t let him photograph you,” Stan said, looking at my dick more than me. “You’d never live it down.”

His hand tightens on me, slick and slow, drier than I remember. Disco-house pours down from every direction, softer than I remember, too. My whole body is strung tight and begging. I close my eyes, feeling the world through my cock: wet lips replacing fingers, warm tongue running over me, teasing me.