The Hungarian Chronicles

 Hungarian Chronicles

 (plot immediately follows the Bulgarian chronicles)

 

The day after I had decided to leave Bulgaria  and had spontaneously bought a train ticket, I went to the train station and bought a 64 ounce of malt liquor for my train journey from Sofia to Budapest and boarded the train.  I had my own cabin and had could blast music on my computer, read, enjoy the scenery and drink beer.

  At the Serbian border the police searched my whole cabin thoroughly.  After the search, the train conductor told me that I could smoke outside my window in my train cabin, but that I didn’t hear it from him.  The scenery riding through the Serbian mountain villages was gorgeous with the lush green hills and the quaint houses.  I was searched again by the Serbian polices when I got to the Serbian-Hungarian border.  After that I went to sleep. When I got into Budapest  I went to the hostel had booked and I was greeted by a very friendly girl with dreadlocks from New Zealand.

    The next morning, I went outside and walked along the Danube River. Budapest is a city divided in half by the Danube River.  The Buda side is the more urban side with all the major commercial sites. The Pest side is dominated by the hills that straddle the Danube. It is more residential and in some places even rural. The Presidential castle was also on the Pest side. It was a stunning example of Austro-Hungarian architecture located on the base of the hills.  It was a foggy and misty morning as I walked along the river and through the city and drank mulled wine.  It was late November and the Christmas markets were open.

  In Budapest, there were really a lot of amazing things to do.  One day I went to an old Ottoman Bath house and soaked in the beautiful Turkish baths and one day I went to an old catholic church on top of one of the hills on the Pest side facing the Danube. I ate langos, which a soft Hungarian bread covered with cheese and garlic, almost all of the time. 

 One day I decided to go to a traditional Hungarian folk dance on the Pest side because I had been really interested in folk music of Hungary since I heard Márta Sebestyén and Muzikas as a teenager.  Hungarian folk music was influenced by the music and culture of the Roma people and has a haunting and ecstatic quality.  I learned that there would be a Hungarian folk dance on the Pest side. When I got there, it was in an old Hungarian community dance hall.  The people there were really friendly. I ate some vegetarian Goulash and drank red wine.  The music started playing; it was free spirited, wild and beautiful.  Everyone then got in a circle dance and I joined in.  Some of the steps were pretty complicated but everyone was really patient.  After the dance I went back to the hostel and everyone started watching “Hostel.” I can tell you that watching “Hostel “in a Hostel is an experience in itself.

  During the day, I would write the squats in Berlin and ask them if I could stay there, I would walk around the city a bit, go to the tradition Hungarian Market, and hang out in the hostel and watch scrubs and drink with the people in the hostel..  It was a really cozy and friendly hostel and sometimes I would go out with some people from the hostel. It was always fun but the places we went played music that wasn’t really my music.

  I looked on MySpace for a listing of punk shows in Budapest and found there was a ska show and a punk show the week I was there.  Both of those shows were in a left wing community center which had a big bar and café, a concert room, and rooms for numerous other activities At the ska show, everyone was dressed up in Doc Marten's, Fred Perry's and Ben Sherman's and everyone was skanking.  At the punk show, I meet a group of anarcho punks and we sat on the stairs and talked about punk, politics, Budapest and travelling.

  Although loved Budapest, I was still broke and I was living off of sporadic Western Union payments from my family.  I knew I could not afford to pay to live in a hostel for a long time and my best bet was to stay in the squats in Berlin.  I kept writing the squats and I finally received a response from the Kopi and a response from the Schwarzerkanal saying that I could stay at each of them for a couple weeks.  Kopi was the most famous punk squat in Germany and was first squatted immediately after German reunification. Schwarzkanal was a feminist and queer wagenplatz (kind of a German version of a trailer park) located just outside of the Spree. I was excited and decided it was time to travel on.

The Malt Liquor Diaries: Return to New York Part III

 At this point I will jump forward again. There will be episodic jumps in my narrative now and then because increasingly I realize that that is how memory is.  The sequence of linear time and narrative continuity, with all the moments of dullness and boredom, is not how we actually experience memory[KG1] .  We forget a whole lot, there are things that we never forget, and there are things we thought we forgot or thought we knew until something reignites that memory in a new way.  It is in this light that I would like to recount my recent visit to New York City

  Until my recent trip, I had not been in the United States for 5 years.  New York had been the last place in the United States I had lived. While I was there was there, I got a Masters in philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook Manhattan and I began a Ph.D. program at the New School.  My time in New York had been transformative and I have more friends there than in any other place I have been.  At the same time New York is a hard place to live because of the extremely high cost of living and the pressure that goes with it. When my mom died I could not take it anymore.  I decided to get a TESOL certificate and travel the world teaching English.

   My plan initially had been to teach in Indonesia. I went there and taught there for a month but I ended up coming back to Europe after three months. I came back to Europe because on my way to Indonesia I spent some time in Berlin were I ended up meeting Lilly, a girl I would be in a four year relationship with.  This is not the focus of this blog entry, but I promise I will return to it at a later date.

  Lilly and I had been deeply in love and it was the first time I had ever been in a relationship. She was beautiful, intellectually curious, and had a good heart.  0ur relationship changed and enriched us both in profound ways, but it was fraught with difficulties.  She was 13 years younger than me and was concerned about my drinking, but the biggest problem we had was that it was hard for me to get the right to stay in Germany and find work there.

  There were periods where I lived illegally in Germany and there were times that I had to travel outside Germany for months at a time to renew my visa.  There was a point where I had a visa but it was very difficult to find work teaching English because at the time I was living in Berlin, which is a city where a lot of people speak English.  Eventually my visa was about to expire and the only way for us to stay together was either for us to get married or for me to go to another country.  For me a marriage certificate was just a paper and it had no bearing on our relationship but she was 13 years younger and it weighed heavier on her.  I decided to move to Istanbul to see if I could improve my work situation while she finished her last year of University.

  I got a contract in Istanbul teaching kids English and was teaching private lessons to adults on the side.  Lilly and I had made an agreement that we could sleep with other people because we both felt it wasn’t fair to expect the other person to not have sex if we would only see each other a couple times a year.  Our ground rules had been that we would tell each other if something happened and the connection would only be physical and not emotional.  Our plan was that I would come back after I had finished my contract and Lilly had finished her University studies.

  A couple of months before I was to move back to Germany, I went to visit Lilly and found out that she had been in a relationship with a guy for several months and that she had lied about it.  I was angry, deeply hurt and felt betrayed, but I felt that I had to give our relationship another chance if she was willing to stop seeing the other guy.  In the end she decided to stay in the new relationship and I flew to Colombia as fast as I could. 

  There are a lot of great things about Colombia and I promise I will return to them later, but at this point I can only say that I lost it there.  I felt as if my life had ended, and felt that no one would be attracted to me again. I began drinking even more than I usually do and did cocaine. I got into fights, was often erratic and of course I alienated a lot of people.  After six months I decided to leave Bogota to move to Mexico City.

  Travelling is often romanticized and it has changed and enriched me in many ways but it can be terribly lonely and I am prone to heavy bouts of depression.  On arriving to Mexico City, I did not know what to do but start again.  I missed my friends and family deeply but I literally did not have enough money to visit them.  It was important to me to be independent and continue to work.  At times I felt desperate and crazy, but in Mexico City I was able to find more work.

  I had been working in Mexico City at both the Banco de Mexico, the national bank of Mexico, and at a private language school were I also took Spanish classes.  I did not have a work permit so I was only allowed to stay in Mexico for six months and then had to leave and come back.  I definitely did not want to be illegal in Mexico, so after 5 months I made preparations to leave.  I didn’t have a lot of money so any thought of visiting Salem, where my family lives, or New York, was out of the question  This was also complicated by the fact that I had my debit card stolen some weeks before so I couldn’t buy the ticket myself.

  I decided to try to go to Guatemala but when I looked at the cost of the flight was almost the same as going to New York.  I then borrowed money from my Father and booked a flight to New York City.

  I[KG2]  arrived in Newark at 10:30 on Wedensday night and headed towards Bay Ridge Brooklyn where my friends Kristen and David lived.  On the way to Penn Station, I drank some of the Honey Bourbon that I had bought at the duty free store.  It was a bit strange to be able to understand everything people were saying but it felt good to be back in the United States.  When I got to Penn Station I bought two slices of Pizza and a 30oz cup of hard cider.  As I headed to the Subway I ran into a homeless man I knew from the Sufi Tekke.  I had only been in New York for less than an hour and I was already meeting people I knew.  That was a good sign, but that’s how New York is.

  The next morning I had brunch with Marianne and her baby Dean.  Marianne has been two years ahead of me in my Ph.D. program in philosophy at the New School. We had shared interests in anarchism, punk music and emancipatory politics.  We both had been members of People in Support of Women in Philosophy, a group wherein members critiqued each other’s papers.  The group was very lively and intellectually engaging and we would often end up going to a bar called Spain in the West Village after the meetings to hangout.

  I meet Marianne on Thursday at noon at Café Orin, which is a small café in the East Village that serves Middle Eastern breakfast dishes.  It is very quaint and cozy and the staff is very friendly.  It was great to see Marianne with her baby.  She looked really happy and her baby had beautiful and bold blue eyes.  We both ordered the Tunisian eggs.  She told me how her life had been enriched by having Dean and I told her about my travels.  We both agreed that we probably did not want to work in academia because of the lack of job opportunities and the low pay.  She told me that she had been getting editing work and that she really liked it and that it gave her time to be with her baby.  Dean woke up and was a little fussy.  I first I started making funny faces to get him to laugh and he was mildly amused.  He then started to cry, and I screamed imitating. He laughed and beamed with joy.  After breakfast, I walked with Marianne to the New School and then returned to the East Village to walk around a bit.

 

After a while, I decided to go to the Double Down Saloon, which is a punk bar in the lower east side where I would hang out a lot.  One of the main things that I really missed about the United States is how complete strangers will sit at a bar and start talking to each other.  In my experience this does not really happen in other countries except for Britain and Ireland.  In other countries I have found that most people go to a bar in groups and that they tend to stay in their group.  When I got to the Double Down, there were four guys sitting around the bar and the bartender was a girl with purple hair and glasses.  I got a well bourbon and everyone started talking about everything from Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump to punk rock and films. The bartender kept on telling me that she appreciated me and I could tell that she meant it.  I ended up talking to a girl who was in an Indy band in Brooklyn about how she wanted to branch out musically. We talked about travel and how New York had changed.

  It was about 6 and I knew that Amy would be working at the Sidewalk café.  Amy had been my favorite bartender at the Mars Bar, which had been a crazy punk dive bar in the East Village.    Mars Bar had been my favorite bar when I lived in New York and Amy and I spent many nights talking to each other there and we had become friends.  Amy was a very a very sweet person but she masked her sweetness with a feisty attitude which I liked.  Above all I knew that Amy was someone who would be there for you when it really counted and that is rare. Mars Bar had closed days before I left New York and Amy now worked at the Sidewalk Café.

  When I got to the Sidewalk Café, Amy and I gave each other a big hug.  Amy was pretty busy because she had to fill all the drink orders at the tables but we were able to catch up with each other.  I only stayed about an hour but it meant a lot for me to see her.  Next I headed over to the Sufi tekke in Tribeca.

  I got to the Sufi tekke around 10 PM. I ran into Lutfi and Halil.  I talked to Halil a bit about my experiences teaching English in different countries and he told me how he had been working with homeless kids lately. Halil looked exactly the same and talking with him made me feel like I had just seen him yesterday and that time had not passed.  I saw Shaykha Fariha and she beamed a smile of welcoming at me.  The Sufi zikr was very centering and I felt peace in my heart when we chanted.  When the zikr was over, I talked to people a bit and then Zhati gave me a ride back to Bay Ridge.

  The next day I woke up a little late and I spent the afternoon laying in the sun a reading in Central Park.  At 6:30 I was going to meet Beth at the Clockwork Bar in the Lower East Side.  I had first met Beth over ten years ago at Oren’s coffee in the Grand Central Market.  I would go there to buy fine coffees and teas and we would end up talking.  When I first met her, Beth struck me as a really interesting person.  She was quirky, had her own style, and was funny, intelligent and empathic.  Over the years I would really take a lot of joy in the conversations we would have. We developed a good friendship and we would sometimes hang out.

  The period I had known Beth had been very formative and when she first met me I had been naïve, dressed like an old man, and not confident in myself.  Beth at that time had been a bit tomboyish, rarely went out and was a bit shy.  We both had changed a lot over the years.

   When the time came to meet Beth, I got on the Subway outside Central Park and Headed to the East Broadway subway station.  When I got to the Clockwork Bar, Beth was sitting at a barstool and she got up and we embraced.  She was wearing a heavy Metal t-shirt and black jeans, had a skateboard with her, and her glasses were gone.  Without her glasses, her grayish blue eyes were striking.  We sat at the bar and ordered two well bourbons and started talking.  I told her about my travels and she told me what she had been up to.  She was now working in a museum downtown, played in a Heavy Metal band, skated, went out all the time and lived in the East Village.  She had changed a lot from the girl who always stayed home with her boyfriend and I liked the changes. She seemed a lot happier and glowed with vitality.  We order two Genesees and talked with her friend. After about an hour, we had to go because R-Tronika, a kumbia punk band led by my friend Renzo was playing in Greenpoint.

  When we got to the club we grabbed a couple of beers and danced to the kumbia songs R-Tronika was playing. By doing so, we gave the crowd more energy and some other people started dancing.  I was always afraid to dance to Kumbia in Latin America but I had learned a little bit and dancing with Beth was fabulous.  After R-Tronika was over, I said hello to Renzo and introduced Beth to him.

  Beth and I decided that we wanted to try to get into the sold out Subhumans show that was also in Greenpoint.  The Subhumans had been one of my favorite bands and Beth had never seen them.  We might not get in but we could at least hear them from the club’s bar and I thought I would see a lot of old friends there.

  We decided to walk a bit to get to a road where there would be more taxis because we were in the middle of a warehouse district that felt deserted.  We grabbed a 40oz of Old English for our journey at a mini mart.  The walk through the deserted factory district turned out to be longer than we thought be we did not care; we were sharing the 40, laughing, and talking about our lives.  After a while we needed to take a rest and we sat on the stairs of one of the warehouses.  At this point, I was feeling a bit reflective and I knew Beth was someone I could really trust.  Before my visit to New York I had been in the middle of one of my periodic bouts of depression, where I felt completely desperate, hopeless and was sometimes even suicidal, (including putting suicidal posts on Facebook).  I knew I probably needed psychological help, but when you are often broke, have no insurance, and live in a country where you do not speak the language very well, that can be hard to get.

  I knew Beth had also suffered depression so I wanted to talk to her about it.  She told me that she had started taking meds three months ago and that she hadn’t felt depressed the entire time she had been taking meds.  She said that was amazing because she would fall into pretty bleak bouts of depression all of her life.  I had always thought I could solve my problems with depression if I could be with the right people and in the right living situation.  And of course I always failed.  I told Beth this and she said that having good people around and actively trying to change your life are important but for some people medication is needed and that I probably needed it too.  I agreed with her and appreciated her advice but years ago I would have been very resistant to any such idea.

  We tried and failed to get a Lyft car to the Subhumans but we finally got there and the Subhumans were in the middle of their set.  The door to the stage room was open so we rushed to the front of the stage and the Subhumans were in the middle of “Rats” and Beth started moshing.  When the Subhumans started playing “Religious Wars,” I started moshing too.  I was a little surprised I didn’t know too many people at the show but I think most of the people I knew went to Punk Rock Bowling.  When the show was over, I ran into Danny and Katri who I had known in New York before and who also went to Bogota with their bands when I was living there.  I introduced them to Beth and then Beth and I went outside.  We both grabbed tall boys of malt liquor and we talked to the people on the street before deciding to take a taxi back to the East Village to the Double Down Saloon.

  At the Double Down, we ordered two Genesees and sat at the bar.  These guys kept on coming up to me and were trying to start a fight because I had on a left wing soccer supporters t-shirt and they appeared to be right wing but I ignored them. I was pretty sure they didn’t know what the t-shirt meant.  Beth and I were talking and I was holding Beth’s hand, which was something I sometimes do with my female friends when drunk.  She put my hand on her leg and told me she liked how I had changed and that I was stronger and more self-confident.  Suddenly a moment passed between us and we kissed. It was tender, sensual and passionate.  I was very surprised because I never looked at her that way but it felt right.  We continued kissing and it was clear that something had shifted between us and we had to explore it.  Beth was a little worried that if we did anything more it might affect our friendship, but she too thought it was important to follow our feelings. I assured her whatever we did would not affect our friendship.  We decided to take a cab back to Bay Ridge and when we walked out we saw that the people who had been fucking with me had started a fight outside.

  We held each other’s hands and kissed in the cab on the way to Bay Ridge.  When we got in Kristen was still working on a conference paper. She greeted us and then she said she would give us a little privacy and she went into the other room.

  Beth and I resumed kissing and making out, and at times we smiled and laughed at the novelty of the situation, but it felt comfortable and right.  We had sex and then later we ended up arguing because I was insecure.  Beth understood my insecurity because she had known me for 10 years and she forgave me.  In the morning, we had sex again and I will never forget how beautiful she looked when she was on top of me.  After that, we went out to eat bagels and Beth took the train back home.

  On Saturday, I went to one of the last punk shows at ABC No Rio, which had been holding Punk Matinees for over 25 years.  At ABC No Rio, I saw my friends Amilcar and Shawn and afterwards I went to Welcome to the Johnsons and hung out with my friends Justin, Paul, Camila and Angelia.  I was going to meet with Kristen but she thought I was too drunk and I ended up going back to Bay Ridge and falling asleep.

  On Sunday, I went with Kristen and David to an early reggae party in Coney Island, where my friend Pinto was Djing, and we were going to meet Beth and Tone Tank.  Tone Tank had been in an antifascist boxing group with me and he was a rapper.  It took Kristen, David and I some time to find the soundsystem but we finally did and I greeted Pinto.  Kristen and David went to the beach and I waited for Beth and Tone on the boardwalk.  When they came, we all went to the beach.  Everyone could hear the rocksteady perfectly and we all talked.  At one point, I stood in the sea with Beth and we talked.  Tone Tank suggested we get some coconut water to drink so we set off looking for someone who sold them.  I walked and talked to Tone tank about his recent trip to Puerto Rico.  In the end we couldn’t find coconut water so Kristen, David and I got Pina coladas but they were weak.  Kristen and I went to the liquor stole to get coconut rum and I ended up losing my wallet.

   When we got back, Beth and Tone both had to go and I tried to kiss Beth as she left, but she turned away.  She told me it was good that what had happened between us had happened, but we were friends so we shouldn’t do it again.  Then she told me that she loved me.  Kristen, David, and I then went to the East Village and drank Japanese beer and ate an enormous amount of Japanese food.  We returned to Bay Ridge, had a couple of drinks and then went to sleep.  The next morning I missed my flight but American Airlines rebooked me without charging me.  There was some delay and I arrived in Mexico City at 4 a.m. the next morning.