The poverty of the East. Great to see you, Cousin, seems to be the prevailing sentiment. When are you leaving?

Now that U2 could walk back and forth from the East to the West, they realized that the sense of West Berlin as illuminated was not an illusion. The lights were literally brighter. The streetlamps of the East were dull, dirty yellow. The streetlights of the West were golden and white, and of higher wattage. The West had better generators. Bono was especially struck by the glow of ultraviolet lights in the windows of Eastern buildings so crowded together that little sunlight got through. Bono had associated the purple glow of UV lighting with nightclubs and raves, but to the East Germans it represented an attempt to grow flowers in the shadows.

By the sides of the streets in the West were the abandoned, burned-out carcasses of Trabants, the comically cheap automobiles manufac­tured in East Germany. Refugees had driven the Trabants as far as they'd go, and then left them where they died to continue their migra­tions on foot. Big trucks full of East German currency were rolling up to West Berlin banks to exchange bales of useless money for deutsche marks to pay the soldiers of the disintegrating communist army. The spirit of Berlin felt less rapturous, more mundane, than U2 had thought it would. They passed the one subway terminal where heavily patrolled trains had been allowed to move from East to West, and where East Germans trying to sneak aboard had been killed. They took note of its name: Zoo Station.

At 7 in the morning exhaustion dropped on their history-happy heads and U2 were led to the accommodations Dennis Sheehan, their road manager, had arranged. For Bono it was this private house where Soviet officials had lodged, and the special comfort of Brezhnev's bed.

So this morning Bono, full of emotion and alcohol, should be sleep­ing like Lenin but something has awakened him. He crawls out of bed hoping for a glass of water and, in his hungover state, wanders down into the basement. While standing there, naked from the waist down, dressed only in a dirty T-shirt, he thinks he hears low voices and the rattling of doorknobs. Someone is trying to get into the house. He creeps up the stairs and sees that the intruders are inside already! Bono is suddenly aware, like Adam in the Garden, that he has no pants on and his cock is hanging out. As the intruders enter the hallway where Bono is crouching he tries to cover his nuts with one hand while with the

[4]

other waving and in his hoarse voice declaring, "This is my house! You do not belong here!"

Bono is unprepared for the response he gets from the ringleader, an elderly German man, who shouts back, "This is not your house! This is my house! You get out!" Bono, bent over with his balls in his hand, surveys the gang of home invaders, a middle-aged to elderly family of six filing in cautiously behind the firm father, who seems prepared to jump on Bono and wrestle him to the floor. Bono is disoriented. He feels like a kid caught trespassing by his elders, not a wealthy international figure whose accommodations have been intruded upon. "This is my house!" the old man repeats. And as Bono stumbles to try to find his German and sort our the confusion, it becomes apparent that the old walrus is not misdirected. This is their house. They were visiting the western side of town in 1961 when the Wall went up. Now they arc home, and they want their house back.

And so it comes to pass that Bono and the rest of U2 end up checking into a particularly ugly East Berlin hotel (no rooms in the West!) while bellhops disconnect the KGB security cameras and unscrew the bedposts to check for Stasi bugs. There are prostitutes in the lobby trying to organize some currency exchanges. Bono knows well the un­spoken meaning of the doleful looks he gets from Adam, Edge, and Larry. He's been getting them since they started their schoolboy band fourteen years ago. The looks say, "Another of your great ideas, Bono, another inspiration."

It is the autumn of 1990 and U2 has spent the year out of the public eye. Playing an emotional concert at home in Dublin on the last night of the 1980s, Bono told the audience, "We won't see you for a while, we have to go away and dream it all up again." It was widely speculated in the press that this meant U2 was breaking up. In fact it just meant that the band knew that the musical line they had been following had run out of track. On tour in Australia in the autumn of '89 Larry had told Bono that if this is what it meant for U2 to be superstars, he didn't like it. They were turning into the world's most expensive jukebox. They became so bored playing U2's greatest hits that one night they went out and played the whole set backward—and it didn't seem to make any difference.

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