The sexiest encounters of my life were with girls at classical music concerts, while I was sitting in the back row---the red scallop neck girl at the Barbican, little brown bob who sat opposite me in the Barbican lobby, black fur coat at the Wigmore, the grey skirt lush in the Wigmore lobby. The erections I have got in art galleries! Especially the Brussels Museum of Modern Art and the Wiertz Museum---I have got to go back to Brussels this autumn! To the Modern Art [gone, waiting for it to be put back in place], the Wiertz, the Cathedral, the Gare du Midi Pullman bar [gone], it is such a morbidly erotic place, even before I get up to Empire and the Gare du Nord. I got great erections in Antwerp, too. And Munich Neue Pinakothek. Oh how erotic it is to be there during the day, going to the New Pin and Lamm's [gone], knowing it is just preparation for what I am going to do later---cross Bayerstraße and round the corner of Schillerstraße and disappear into the White Coffin [Atlantic City]. My heroes are Walter Benjamin, Karl Kraus, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx. I live every day of my life now as if I am on holiday, just drinking and eating and w-----g. The gorgeous beer in the Calcutta, the gorgeous fish & chips in Dionysus [gone], the gorgeous KFC in Leicester Square. The gorgeous tuna & mayo rolls in Charing Cross Station. When in Berlin I live for the knesepfannes [gone] in my hotel bar and the ham & eggs rolls in Thobens at Berlin Zoo station. In Vienna it is the alt wiener rostbratens in my hotel bar; I no longer go to Wegenstein's after the staff attacked me. I went back once but it is always so empty there, in contrast to the warmth & conviviality of Lamm's in Munich. I think I almost go to Munich solely so I can eat in Lamm's & have a glass of their ice cold Augustiner beer. I go to Berlin solely so I can eat the knesepfannes in my hotel & the Zoo Thobens rolls. Oh I so much want to go back to Munich! But where to stay---the Regent which I love for its bar, or the Intercity for its ease? I go to Vienna solely for the cold Zipfers served by the white shirted girls in the Dorint bar before I commence my afternoon of sightseeing, which usually means St Stephen's Cathedral, the Pummerin bell made out of Turkish cannons left behind after the Siege of Vienna, the Butterfly House, the KHM, the Belvedere and the Leopold. Always the same places. Sometimes I will mix in a few Third Man sites, like the Am Hof, and the steps where Harry Lime stood when the cat gave him away and we see him for the first time. I will not go into the sewers again.
After Lamm’s [gone] what else is there to do for me in Munich, apart from struggling to the New Pin & trying to make it back to the Intercity before I explode? Nothing. Really. Lamm’s is the be all and end all of my every day in Munich. At nights, the White Coffin [Atlantic City] becomes the be all and end all but I think even that has finished for me now, as it has become just full of memories which the here and now increasingly struggles to live up to. The more fantastic memories you have built up in a place, or exquisitely painful ones, the more blood you have left on the tracks, the harder it is to get the same thrill out of the place & the more disappointing it becomes. It becomes a law of diminishing returns. There is a rising arc of your first few visits when it gets better & better, then you reach the zenith, then level off, then the arc inexorably descends, and every trip becomes increasingly distressingly flat and uneventful. The whores get more flat-chested and unattractive every time you go. In Berlin, Yulia, Riccarda, Iga, Diana, gone forever. Maybe they were always poor but the excitement of going somewhere new made them seem more sexy and alluring than they really were. The more you return the more you tend to see the same women in the cold light of day, as it were, and you realise they weren’t all they were cracked up to be.
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