Berlin Mermaids

From a distance mermaids are beautiful, voluptuous, luscious. Quite a few visitors to Berlin fall in love with them. As I said, from far away they move quite gracefully.

Yet up close they smell strongly of fish, curse worse than sailors, and pass gas while making vulgar jokes and demanding money. They’re earthy and interesting, the kind of people you’d hang out with at a corner bar, getting you drunk, then going through your wallet plucking euro bills and fishing them into the casino slot machine until either 5 a.m. or when your wallet is empy.

A few mermaids were involved in an infamous funny story, something involving businessmen trying to get into Berghain, opportunistic local women, and several gay hairdressers. The whole incident was so messy it took several cleaning crews to fix things up, and even more money for the local businessmen to scrape the internet stories clean although if you’re very persistent you can still google the details, European privacy laws be damned.

The mermaids still cause a lot of trouble for the locals, but the worst behavior has been curbed. I’m not sure how the authorities pulled it off; something about a carrot being better than a stick. I think it involves some kind of junk food offer as the pleas not to mess things up in public worked, and now there are no more mermaids defecating all over Friedrichshain like in the bad good old days. So the junk food offer, it’s some kind of dessert that’s specific to mermaid taste buds, and it’s quite controversial because some people wonder if it’s akin to drugs, but for these complex reasons that’s why the mermaids nowadays are looking more haggard.

The mermaids are slowly disappearing from the scene though. A lot of them have moved to Leipzig. Rent is climbing, so carrot and stick be damned, it’s mostly stuff like pure economics that drives the interesting people in and out of any random big city. There are still some die-hards hanging out.

I don’t think Berlin will ever not have mermaids, as someone set up a fund to keep them there. The worst sin is for anywhere to become boring, and the mermaids keep things interesting, attracting the wrong kinds of tourists, then fleecing them.

Me, I’m lucky to have gotten away with my wallet and passport still on me, but the evening I spent with the mermaids was the most fun I’d had in a while, although I can’t say what happened! It’s too scandalous.

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