Funny how an old memory recalled can open the floodgates of the mind. It occurred to me today that there might have been more than one red light district in Berlin. Augsburger Strasse was the one everybody talked about, so I assumed that it was the only one, but maybe not. I do remember one time my buddy Richardson (the guy who taught me the protocol) and I had an encounter with a couple of girls in another neighborhood. Richardson said later that they might have been amateurs because they charged less than the going rate, 15 dollars for a quickie, which came out to about a dollar a minute. That was a lot of money in those days, but a guy could easily spend that much just getting drunk and have nothing to show for it but a hangover, so I thought this was a better use of my time and money.
Because they all charged the same rate and dressed the same, I once jokingly asked one of them if they had a union, and she said "yes" without cracking a smile. It just dawned on me today that they might have indeed, not a labor union like at the paper mill, more like a guild or a professional association. The girls I met by the Red Chinese Embassy might have been members of a different association, since they all dressed the same as each other, but not the same as the Augsburger girls. They might have had a permit or something to work that particular street and decided not to renew it when it expired because they thought they could make more money elsewhere. I think this makes more sense than Richardson's theory that they came in from out of town for just that one night.
The Augsburger girls always wore a red coat or outer garment, nothing flashy, but always red, which is why I mistook that civilian lady for one of them. They usually didn't make eye contact or approach you in any way, you had to approach them first. Although most of them spoke some English, you had to address them in German or they would just ignore you. Richardson said that was because they weren't interested in talking to American GIs because, more often than not, they would just harass them and otherwise waste their time. Time was money to those ladies, and you had to respect that. Speaking of respect, you had to begin your proposition with the formal term "wollen sie" (will you), not the familiar form "wilst du", which was reserved for close friends, younger family members, and servants. Like I said, it was a simple protocol, but it let them know that you were serious about it and not just jerking their chain.
When I approached that civilian lady in the proper manner, I could tell that she was offended, so I tried to apologize in German. She said, "Maybe we should try English", which we did. She asked me what led me to believe that she was a professional, to which I replied "Well, you are standing on a corner of Augsburger Strasse that is not marked as a bus stop and you are wearing a red coat." She looked down at her coat, then up at the street sign overhead, and laughed. She told me that I had made a reasonable, albeit false, assumption, and that she would ask her boyfriend to meet her on a different corner next time. She than asked me if I thought she would have been worth the price, and I said that I certainly did. The rest of it you know, her boyfriend showed up, she got into his car, and I never saw her again.
The auxiliary service I mentioned was just little oral stimulation, not that I needed it but, since she offered, I felt it would be ungrateful of me to refuse.
Here's another update on the border crisis:
https://a.msn.com/r/2/BBRj9kr?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare
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