The Awl http://www.theawl.com/ Be Less Stupid Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:25:58 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.2 Where Were You When the Berlin Wall Fell? http://www.theawl.com/2009/11/where-were-you-when-the-berlin-wall-fell http://www.theawl.com/2009/11/where-were-you-when-the-berlin-wall-fell#comments Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:25:58 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2009/11/where-were-you-when-the-berlin-wall-fell The Fall of DawnWhere were you when the Berlin Wall fell on this fine day in November of 1989? I remember it vividly. That was the year they were playing "Nothing Compares 2 U" all the time. I lived in a one bedroom apartment two blocks off Hollywood Boulevard, in the city of golden dreams, with a nice young former waitress named Dawn, who right around that time received a free roundtrip ticket to Hawaii from the apartment building manager/hooker who lived with his wife and child and sometimes his male lover across the courtyard.

I knew Dawn because we'd been waitrons in Chicago together, before we'd driven out west. I was working at Euro Coffee on Melrose Boulevard, where Nic Cage would send his dames in to have me make him a latte while he sat in a convertible outside. Dawn is kind of a whorey name, which, well, that worked. Eventually Dawn called from Hawaii; she had promptly lost the return ticket and couldn't ever get back and therefore I lost the lease.

This building was just like Melrose Place, except no one ever swam in the courtyard pool and cars had a tendency to be lit on fire outside and apparently all our neighbors were trannie hookers, except that one girl downstairs who claimed she'd gone to middle school with me, but who remembered middle school? So yeah, I guess it was exactly like Melrose Place.

Anyway, we didn't have a TV (or, like, beds or anything, though Dawn had a mattress on the floor and I had a nice foam chair that I'd found in the street) and it wasn't like the newspapers got delivered to the neighborhood-to get groceries, you had to go down to look for the roaming van that sold milk and fruit and stuff to all the old Mexican women-so it was probably a few months before I heard about the whole Berlin Wall thing, and by then, I was like, big deal. If we'd had Twitter back then, or even AOL chatrooms, I bet I would have 1. known about it and 2. had something to say about it for sure!

I guess at the time I was so happy that Ronald Reagan was out of office-well, with hindsight, out of the frying pan and into the presidential fire, am I right?-that I kind of missed the other politics of that year altogether. I wonder whatever happened to Dawn? No one names their baby Dawn any more, for all the obvious reasons.

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]]> The Fall of DawnWhere were you when the Berlin Wall fell on this fine day in November of 1989? I remember it vividly. That was the year they were playing "Nothing Compares 2 U" all the time. I lived in a one bedroom apartment two blocks off Hollywood Boulevard, in the city of golden dreams, with a nice young former waitress named Dawn, who right around that time received a free roundtrip ticket to Hawaii from the apartment building manager/hooker who lived with his wife and child and sometimes his male lover across the courtyard.

I knew Dawn because we'd been waitrons in Chicago together, before we'd driven out west. I was working at Euro Coffee on Melrose Boulevard, where Nic Cage would send his dames in to have me make him a latte while he sat in a convertible outside. Dawn is kind of a whorey name, which, well, that worked. Eventually Dawn called from Hawaii; she had promptly lost the return ticket and couldn't ever get back and therefore I lost the lease.

This building was just like Melrose Place, except no one ever swam in the courtyard pool and cars had a tendency to be lit on fire outside and apparently all our neighbors were trannie hookers, except that one girl downstairs who claimed she'd gone to middle school with me, but who remembered middle school? So yeah, I guess it was exactly like Melrose Place.

Anyway, we didn't have a TV (or, like, beds or anything, though Dawn had a mattress on the floor and I had a nice foam chair that I'd found in the street) and it wasn't like the newspapers got delivered to the neighborhood-to get groceries, you had to go down to look for the roaming van that sold milk and fruit and stuff to all the old Mexican women-so it was probably a few months before I heard about the whole Berlin Wall thing, and by then, I was like, big deal. If we'd had Twitter back then, or even AOL chatrooms, I bet I would have 1. known about it and 2. had something to say about it for sure!

I guess at the time I was so happy that Ronald Reagan was out of office-well, with hindsight, out of the frying pan and into the presidential fire, am I right?-that I kind of missed the other politics of that year altogether. I wonder whatever happened to Dawn? No one names their baby Dawn any more, for all the obvious reasons.

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