He then tried to catch up with us at the autobahn but after an hour of high speed driving the turbo of his old Porsche blew up:
"Scheisse! You have to unload the truck without me! Kluge: keep Matze away from the equipment - if he breaks my Moog, you got yourself a silent film."
Tom bought the Mini Moog from a studio in London where Phil Collins recorded his third album in 1984. The speakers of my old Sager laptop burst at the first intern preview of the Route 66 soundtrack and all Tom had to say was "My soundtrack is not designed for your infantile equipment!"
Anyway, something just flew through the loading space of our truck, hitting the back wall with a startling crash. Some asshole lost his spoiler on the autobahn and the cars on all lanes simultaneously hit the breaks as if Ahmadinedschad just put a nuke into the McDonald's in front of us causing the car computers of all those Bavarians heading north in their BMWs to shut down at 150 mph.
Andrea grabbed her dachshund and starts laughing her ass off as I try to stop the truck. She is the one rarely mentioned at VEB, still constantly working in the background, joining every sick project and getting along with all the weird people involved.
Since she is the one doing the shipping at VEB, she is familiar with every single mailbox in the middle, south and west of the republic. Actually, also in the north.
Funnily enough, we also got to know each other at the Computer Science studies. She was one of the two girls that did make it to the diploma in that class. Although she once set out to study museology. And despite us being more busy driving around on souped-up motorcycles, shooting soft porn pictures at the time.
Meanwhile a one-line-1000-characters-Perl-script was automatically crawling selected websites in my studio - at that time, dial-up internet connections were utterly expensive, but you could cheat by sending a certain impulse which was reserved for the phone company technicians for testing purposes ;o)
Andrea was there when Tom and I produced Route 66 for three months nonstop, 18 hours a day. When the first magazine called me to get Route 66 out on 500.000 DVDs. When we shot "The Last Drug" at 40 degrees Fahrenheit in an unheated storage hall. When Tom examined all the water towers, train stations, ammo bunkers and other bizarre buildings he could get his hands on for more than a year, to check if they would make a good VEB FILM Leipzig headquarter and residence for himself, finally finding a hospice, buying it and getting it up and running.
Back in the truck: I can smell the burned tires. The dachshund is looking funny and Andrea searching the traffic radio. Suddenly it turns into one of those rare moments where you can feel the work of a year getting down to a single moment: the radio announcer tells us that VEB FILM Leipzig is moving into a new headquarter, south of Leipzig. As always: Andrea is there.
