An Encounter ...

  When I got into Berlin I took a bus to the Ostbahnof, which was the old main train station in East Germany.  On the bus ride I saw a lot of Turkish people and enjoyed the German architecture.  Seeing both filled me with nostalgia for my old days in Berlin and Istanbul.  I got off at the Ostbanhof and passed the Mauergalerie, which was an outdoor art mural at the site of the Berlin wall.  I walked across the river Spree and into the courtyard of the Kopi.   The past was flooding back to me. I then arrived at the Reiche 63a and started unpacking.

  I wrote the guys from RASH Berlin and I got a response from them almost immediately and they told me that they wanted to meet me the next night in Fredrichschain.  The next night I met them at the tram station at Frankfurter Tor.  When I got off I saw Patty, Stuhle, Tomek, Res, happy from Freiberg, and Amin.  They had a bottle of vodka with them and we drank together until we got to a small party in a squat where they were playing electronic music.  After a while we got bored and some of the Rash guys decided that they wanted to go to the Freiboiter, which was a skinhead pub in Freidrichschain.  The reason they wanted to go there was because they knew there would be some greyzone skinheads, which are skinheads who are not Nazis but who are open and friendly to right wing ideas and music.  I did not really know what was going on so I stayed outside with Res, who was Stuhle’s girlfriend. When we got there, someone was having a birthday party so there were about 100 greyzone skinheads there. Since the RASH guys were vastly outnumbered, we left.

  I met up with the guys from RASH one more time when I was in Berlin. Los Fastidios, an Italian antifascist streetpunk band, was going to play in Potsdam, a city outside of Berlin.  When I got to Potsdam, I met with the guys and helped them set up. I talked a lot with Tomek who is from Poland his girlfriend’s brother who lived in Boston.  I was impressed with all the antifascist banners in the concert hall. 

 After we had set up, Los Fastidios arrived we went [KG1] with them to the Babelsberg 03 game which was before the concert.  Babelsberg 03 was a soccer team in the North East division in Potsdam Germany and it was one of the few teams in German that was strictly antifascist and supports left wing politics. The atmosphere at the game was fantastic. It was the first time I had experienced the energy and excitement when antifascism is mixed with sports.  After the game we went to the concert. I felt comradery with everyone there. The place exploded with energy as Los Fastidios played.

   I was about to leave for Prague when I heard that Oi Poloi was going to play the week I was leaving.  Oi Poloi was my favorite band at that time. They were an antifascist and anarchist oi band that had gotten into crust punk in their latter years.  I had never seen them and I simply had to go.  My TEFL program was going to start on Monday but I was expected to be there on Saturday.  I wrote them and asked them if I could come on Sunday night and they said ok. 

  Oi Poloi were going to play at a three day punk fest called Resist to Exist, which was the biggest punk festival in Germany.  On the first day of the festival, I left the Reiche 63ª and went to the Lidl and bought two boxes of wine.  At this point, after going to many punk bars and shows in Berlin and having no one talk to me, I resolved that I was not going to try to meet anyone but I was just going to enjoy the music by myself.  I boarded the U bahn at Kottbusser Tor and I got off at Waschauer strasse to transfer to the S bahn.  At the S bahn station there were two punk girls there with red hair.  I was resolved in my intention not to talk to anyone and I just drank beer and listened to my iPod.

  At the festival I walked around a bit and checked out some music.  I then heard that the Autonomads were about to play.  The Autonomads were a dub punk band I had heard about and I was really excited to see them.  I went to the front of the stage and danced. After they played, I sat down by myself and drank some wine.  I was sitting there a bit when Lilly, one of the girls who I had seen at the Waschauer station with red hair, came up to me and said something in German.  She wore the kind of punk clothes a teenager would wear and wore glasses that obscured her eyes but I could tell that she was very beautiful and really kind.  I had studied German years ago at university but my German was quite rusty so I told her that I didn’t speak German.  She could speak a little English, but not very much.  She told me to come over to her and her group of friends and we tried to communicate but her English was quite poor and my German was even poorer.  In the end, none of that really mattered; there was something between us that went beyond the bounds of language and we both knew it.  Within a half an hour, we were kissing and she was a really good kisser.  We laid in the grass and kissed and made out for a good two hours before we returned to her  friends and drank wine with them until I wandered of to watch some other bands and then I returned to her again.

  At the end of the night, we were both quite drunk and I wanted to convince Lilly to come home with me. There was a reggae nighter at Tommyhaus, a squat in Berlin, which was quite near to my house and all the people from RASH Berlin would be there. I told her that we should go together and that she could stay with me in my room in Reiche 63a afterwards. Her friend Anya tried to convince Lilly not to go with me but Lilly really wanted to.  Lilly told me later that she trusted me from the beginning.  We then got on the S bahn and headed towards Tommyhaus, kissing and caressing the whole time

  When we went to Tommyhaus we ran into the people from RASH immediately and they greeted me and I introduced them to Lilly.  The rocksteady music was nice, but it was so crowded there was no place to sit.  After a while, we were more into each other than the music and we decided to go back to my place at the Reiche 63a.

  We walked the six flights of stairs until we got to my room at the top floor of the Reiche 63a.  We listened to Black Flag and Casa di Chihuahua, which is a country folk band of punks.  We talked, kissed, and made out.  I started sucking her tits.  We then fucked and she was really animalistic and she scratched my back like she never did again.  There was a raw passion between us like I never experienced before or since.

   After we had sex the first time, the man who lived next door banged on and opened our door. We were completely naked. The music wasn’t that loud, but we apologized.  We then turned down the music and proceeded to make out again and the guy banged on the door and the guy opened again [KG2] and we were still naked.  Lilly said she thought he was a pervert because he knew we were naked and he wanted to see us again.  We then turned off the lights and music and we had sex once again.

  I had previously told Lilly everything about me and she accepted it.  At this time I was 32 and she was 20 years old.  I told her that I had thought for long time that no one would be attracted to me because of my disability and that I lost my virginity at age 27 to a sex worker.  Without her glasses on her eyes were a stunning green and she was extraordinary beautiful.  She accepted me totally and thought I was hot.  We feel asleep in each other’s arms and it was wonderful.

  We woke up to Bavarian music playing in the courtyard and she said what the hell why was Bavarian music playing, and I said it’s from your homeland right, she nudged me and said no she wasn’t from Bavaria, but Thuringia.  I kept on teasing her and we both laughed.  We then kissed and stared into each other’s eyes.  She told that she had to get back her friend’s house and that she needed to call her ex-boyfriend Tomas and tell him what had happened because she told him everything.  This sounded a little bit strange to me but I was grateful for the night we had shared.  We parted ways and we were going to meet each other later in the day at the festival.

  I went to the festival and I saw a couple of bands until I found her with about 20 other people.  We kissed but I felt awkward with all those people around.  It definitely didn’t feel as nice as the day before and I didn’t feel like talking to all those people.  I walked off and watched a couple of bands by myself. I came back to her and we watched Oi Poloi together.   After the show was over, we walked to the train. We were with these German guys and I thought they were talking about me.  I accused them of talking shit about me and she said that they weren’t.  On the train she caressed and kissed me to calm me down.  I was going to Prague the next day and I asked me to come visit me in Prague but I never thought that she would take me up on the offer.

Return to New York: Part I

  It is at this point that I must fast forward a bit, with the promise that I will return to the narrative I started in Istanbul.  After having spent two months squatting in Berlin, and beginning a PhD program in Belfast, I decided to return to New York in the summer of 2009.  I left Queens University Belfast because although my supervisor, disability studies scholar Margrit Schildrick was great to work with, the school did not meet my needs . I found Belfast too small and I was out of control.  I accepted an offer from the New School‘s PhD program in philosophy and I got ready to move back to New York.

  My experiences in New York are not the focus of this narrative, but nonetheless I must outline a few of them because they were very important to the reason I set out travelling again in 2011.  When I got to New York, I went immediately to meet my friend Halil, who is a very wise but somewhat reclusive man, at the Pakistani Tea House in Tribeca, New York.  The Pakistani Tea House had been one of my favorite places to eat in New York, and I had spent many long nights there drinking chai and discussing existential questions with Halil.  I caught up with Halil and then I went to move in to an intentional urban community I had found on Craigslist before I left Ireland.  This turned out to be a completely disastrous experience. Later moved to Passout Records, which was a punk rock record store in Williamsburg Brooklyn. 

  At this time at the New School I had the privilege of attending lectures by many prominent philosophic figures such as Simon Critchley, Judith Butler, Jay Bernstein and Richard Bernstein.  It was during this period that my mother’s cancer, which had been in remission, took a turn for the worse.  My mother had mesothelioma, which is an aggressive cancer of the lymph nodes caused by exposure to asbestos, and this cancer is almost always fatal.  I was shaken up really hard by this news.  My mother was definitely the strongest person I have ever known and  I  learned to be strong in my life because of her example.  Throughout my life, my mother had encouraged me to be strong enough to do my best and to have the courage to follow my heart and be myself.  After I had my accident at age three (where I suffered a head injury the caused my cerebral Palsy) and was in a coma for a month I was diagnosed with a 90 percent chance of never walking and talking again. It was she who refused to  follow the doctors suggestions to put me in the kind of institution were people don’t improve and it was she took me home and re-taught me everything herself.

 When I went home for Christmas, I fully expected my mother to die in a couple of weeks.  I tried to make the most of the time I had left with her.  The holiday was nice but it was sad.  I tried to be strong for her, but I felt like I was falling apart.

  After I returned to New York I got some really good news.  My mother’s cancer had gone into full remission and she had no detectable traces of cancer.  She then decided to move to Belize and I welcomed this decision and supported it.  My mother had always wanted to travel more and if anyone deserved a new adventure and some relaxing time in the sun, she did.

  I both loved and hated New York.  I loved the pulse of the city, with its rich multiculturalism and unceasing energy, and I loved that in New York you had the possibility to have truly surprising experiences at any moment.  I hated on the other hand, the extreme pressure to succeed that drove New York, with its hyper-capitalism, which seemed to exert a physical pressure on everyone who lived in the city.  Being back in New York, I felt that I had lost all the confidence that I had gained in my sexuality during my European travels and I was very lonely.  In New York I went on a couple craigslist dates but nothing really panned out except I met  a woman that I dated and had sex with a couple times but she turned out to be too needy and possessive for me to handle.

  I was pretty lonely but I had a life that I loved.  I would attend lectures and write papers that would open me up to new possibility of thinking.  I was increasingly drawn to political philosophy that focused on issues of social justice, responsibility and community. The philosophers that were important to me at this time were Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, Derrida, Judith Butler and Simon Critchley.

 At this time I was also heavily involved in the punk scene and I would go to a concert almost any chance I had.  It was during this period of my life that I made the most friends, and I have kept in touch with many of them.  I would go to many different kinds of punk show in New York and I was friends with a lot of people. I would go to New York Hardcore shows, crust and raw punk show and even folk punk shows.  The crowd, however, that I felt the must affinity with was the Latino political punk scene.  In New York there were punks from all over Latin America from Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Puerto Rico and Ecuador and they were all united.  I found the punks in this scene to be the most welcoming, positive, have the best sense of humor and to take politics most seriously.

   In late May a catastrophe struck.  My brother, we found out, had become addicted to heroin.  My mom immediately flew back to Oregon and in in a routine checkup she found out that her cancer had aggressively returned.  I immediately took a leave of absence from the New School and flew out to Oregon.  We had a nice visit and I tried to be strong for her.  I did not know how long she would live and the prognosis was not good.  Nonetheless I held on to the false hope that she could beat it and that she would go into remission again.  I returned to New York and planned to visit later in the summer.

  During the summer of 2010, I was a complete wreck.  I was wasted all the time and was getting into a lot of fights.  I was completely broke, living off of dumpstered bagels  and it was oppressively hot and muggy.  My mom had been moved to my sister Laurie’s house in Nebraska and it was clear she was getting worse.  I called her nearly every day.  Thing went on like this for weeks when my Laurie informed me that my mother had taken a turn for the worse and that she only had a week at most. I was absolutely desperate and completely broke.   I asked my sister, who had a little bit of money, if she could fly me out but she refused.  My friend Dani agreed to help me out.  I then asked my sister if I could stay with her but she said it was not possible.  I called my Aunt Laura and asked her if she could put me up in a hotel. She agreed to do this and I would leave in a few days.

  This was the last time I would ever see my mother and I knew it.  My mother was bed ridden at this time, so I just sat by her bedside and talked with her, watched TV with her, fed her and held her hand.  She would make jokes, and we would talk about memories, and I told her how much I loved her and appreciated her.  She was on a lot of drugs at this point and the line between reality and fantasy sometimes got blurry.  When we were watching a game show, she asked me if we could go down the stairs to get closer to the stage.  I tried to savor the time as best as I could and let her know all the love I had for her.

  I left early in the morning after four days and got on my flight to New York.  Somehow I found the strength to spend the flight finishing philosophy papers that I couldn’t finish in the spring.  When I got to New York, I went to Dani’s apartment in the Lower East Side.  I did not want to spend the night alone and I really needed to be with a friend. Dani and I were sitting drinking and talking when Dani received a call from my sister as my phone had stopped working just before I left for Nebraska.  My sister told me that my mom had passed away that afternoon.  I wept bitterly and Dani tried to calm me down. We decided the best thing to do was to go to my favorite bar, the Mars Bar. Dani came with me and the bartender Amy who is like a sister to me gave me free drinks all night.

 During the five days between my mom’s death and the funeral in Salem I completely lost it. I was completely suicidal and was having panic attacks in the street. I felt disembodied and unstable.  After the punk’s picnic that weekend in Greenpoint Brooklyn I drank too much and I passed out on the sidewalk in the middle Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint.  Luckily my Russian Rastafarian friend Alex found me, took me home in a taxi, and smoked cigarettes and talked with me until I calmed down.

  When I went back for my mom’s funeral to Oregon, I stayed with my Mom’s husband because he was also losing his mind and I felt he needed to be with someone, and because he was the only person in the family that I knew would have something to drink at the house . It was nice to see everybody but it was very sad.  My sister Laurie brought her family from Nebraska, my sister Lizzie was days from giving birth. My father’s birthday was in the same time I was there.  My Aunt Laura, who I was very close to, also came to the funeral.  I don’t really know what else to say about the funeral.  It was the last time I saw anyone in the family and it was good to see everyone, but I was overwhelmed by irreplaceable loss.

  When I got back to New York, I was dangerously suicidal, depressed, erratic and full of rage. I felt that I had lost my whole world and the one person who truly understood me was gone forever.  People would get angry at me for not moving on and I would get furious with them and stop being friends with them.  I do not regret this.  I did not need friends who would be there in the good times and would not be with me in a time of crisis.  Life has moments of devastating loss and mourning can often take a very long time and the only way I could possibly bear it was by acknowledging the greatness of the loss and seeking to hold on to my mother’s memory.  I did not want to forget and thought that getting over it too quickly would be choosing to forget her.

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Return to New York: part II

   I may well have tried to kill myself or ended up in a mental hospital if I didn’t have a brief but affirming month with Diana from Slovakia.  I was falling apart, but I forced myself to be active and every Saturday afternoon I would volunteer and attend the ABC No Rio hardcore matinees.  ABC No Rio was located in the Lower East Side and every Saturday for the last 20 years they would have concerts that you could hear bands ranging from oi!, hardcore, and crust punk.  There were good people who hung out there and one of them was my good friend Joey who was in the political punk band All Torn Up.

  In between the sets of the band, Joey would lead political discussions in the backyard and during one of these discussions Diana was there. Diana had luminous blue eyes and a radiant smile. She was had travelled to New York for one month to visit her brother and she was very excited to be there.  We hit it off immediately and after the concert we wandered around the East Village and drank.  We ended up in Tompkins Square Park and it wasn’t long before we started kissing. I told her about my mother’s death, my experiences with my disability and my lack of romantic experience. She told me that she had been raped three years ago and had suffered a severe depression because of it and that she had not been interested in anyone since then until she met me.

  We really had a great time together going to all the DIY and punk places in New York. We went to C Squat, which was a squat in the Lower East side that has been around for 20 years and where members of Leftover Crack and other New York City bands lived.  We went to  the Lake, which was a DIY space in Brooklyn that also had great punks show as well as rocksteady shows and d.j. nights-.  We also went to some other places in Brooklyn and we went to the Mars Bar as well  We shared interests in punk and anarchism and she had a strong and fiery energy that was in line with mine.  We would often make out but we only tried to have sex once, but it was too much for her so we ended up pleasuring each other in other ways.  Her presence in September really helped me and I hope I helped her too.  Before she flew back to Slovakia, we got drunk in a bar where my friend Lucie from Belfast was working. I then went with her to the airport and we both cried.  We tried to stay in touch but she became very busy with school.  In her absence, my grief over my mother’s death returned in full force and she got angry at me because of it, and I in turn got angry because of her reaction and we didn’t talk for some time.

  In October there was an incident with Latino Nazis from New Jersey that led to the formation of an antifascist boxing gym that I participated in.  I do not want to go into the issues surrounding the specific threat that prompted the formation of the gym, nor do I want to get into certain internal conflicts which existed in the group. This gym had an extreme positive and life altering effect on me, and I will describe how it affected me below.

  After the threat from the Latino Nazis, Hagler who was the founder of RASH NYC (Red and Anarchist Skinheads) which was the first RASH group worldwide called a meeting of antifascists and proposed that he could lead an MMA class for self-defense so we would be better able to defend ourselves if a threat arose.  A group of the people at that meeting decided to join that class and another group didn’t.  The group that decided to join included punks, skinheads, and people into hip hop. Every Sunday we would meet for about three hours four hours and Hagler would train us in boxing and MMA and  have us do conditioning exercises.  Hagler had been the sparring partner of a professional MMA fighter and was an extremely good coach.    We bonded like brothers and we would we would often go out to eat Mexican food or pizza together, were would crack jokes and Hagler would impart his wisdom from being an active antifascist for 20 years.  It was extremely inspiring and it impacted who I am today.  During the time I was involved in the gym, I felt healthier and I felt a very strong sense of comradery. 

  Despite that boxing gym being such a positive influence, I knew that I could not go on being a PhD student in New York.  I was really hurting and the pain just would not go away.  Being a philosophy grad student involves long periods of reflection on the complexities of life, and through the aim of philosophy is to produce arguments that hold a universal value, for me the only way to do write philosophy was by dealing with the personal and I could not do it anymore.  I missed my mother and I was a complete romantic failure and the pressures of New York were driving me crazy.

  Going to Istanbul had really helped me deal with the insecurities I had about sex. I was mocked as a child because of my disability I had really felt undesirable.  The experience I had with Yasmin in Istanbul  had really gave me a confidence that I didn’t have before and this endured the whole time I was travelling.  Since being back in New York, and enduring the harrowing experience of my mom dying of cancer, I felt like I had definitely regressed.  The confidence that I gained was gone, I was broken, and I really felt that my disability was a hindrance for me finding a partner in the social climate of New York.  I decided that I needed to go as far away as possible.  I decided to go to Indonesia because I heard that it had a great punk and antiracist skinhead scene and it really sounded intriguing.  I had inherited a little money from my mother and I decided it was better to use it to change my life instead of spending it on bullshit.  I decided I wanted to teach English in Indonesia, but I wasn’t going to do it like I did in Turkey.  I needed a recognized certificate so I could get a better job.  I looked on the internet and I found a Trinity Cert TESOL program in Prague. I applied and was accepted.

  My situation with my roommate Chris had also deteriorated rapidly.  Chris ran the Lake, a d.i.y. punk venue in New York and was also part of the boxing club.  Our relationship deteriorated because he would repeatedly disrespect and berate me, and I would react in drunken rage.  At this point I was pretty extreme but it was not unprovoked and I do not regret it.  Because of this situation, I decided to leave earlier than I had planned and stay two weeks in Berlin at a squat I had stayed before, the Reiche 63A.

The decision to go to Berlin ended up sending me on the four year journey that I am still on now.  Traveling had changed my life before and I felt that I would help me again.  I was not wrong.  Within weeks I would meet someone who would affect me a great deal, and with whom I would spend four yearS trying to overcome borders to be with.

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