An Unwelcome Return: Down and Out in New York

 I had been traveling for 5 years when I decided that I had to go back to the United States. I had left five years before because I was depressed and suicidal after my mother had died. I couldn't continue in the philosophy PhD program that I was enrolled in at the New School. It was too much pressure and I needed a change. I took a leave of absence from the New School and I decided that I would spend a year teaching English in Indonesia, a culture that seemed fascinating. To me this felt like the biggest change I could possibly make, life seemed new to me and I was excited.

I decided that I needed to get a TEFL certification before I went to Indonesia because I had spent three months in Istanbul teaching English two years before and I knew the kind of job you can get without a TEFL certificate could be dodgy. I enrolled in the program at Oxford TEFL Prague scheduled for August 2011. Before I went to Prague I decided to spend 2 weeks in Berlin, a city where I had spent two months the winter two years before.

 During the two weeks I was in Berlin something happened that would change my life for the next few years dramatically. In Berlin this German named Lily came up to me at a concert and we hit it off immediately. We ended up having a one-night stand and a month later she visited me for a week and Prague after I left my TEFL program. It was one of the best weeks of my life and we had a blast. We made a connection that touched us both. At the end of it I wanted to go back to Germany with her but I knew that I couldn't back out on my plans to go Indonesia. I made my way to Indonesia via a month long stay in Thailand.

I continued talking to Lily the three months I was in Southeast Asia and we grew ever closer. I eventually knew that we  had a special connection and that I wanted to pursue it. With the encouragement of my friend Joey I told Lily wanted to be in a relationship with her and I asked her if I moved back would she be interested in this too. She said yes. 

 At this point I must discuss some more things about myself. This was a major step for me because at this point I was 32 and I had never been relationship. I have cerebral palsy and growing up I thought that no one would ever be attracted to me becausemy body had been mocked growing up and girls had  constantlyrejected me. I had lost my virginity at age 27 from prostitute and had some experiences after that but I didn't have anything close to a relationship. I was taking a chance and in the end it panned out.

 In my relationship with Lily, I can say I was less depressed and that I have never loved anyone as much as I loved her but our relationship was fraught with difficulties. She was 13 years younger than me, I couldn't find work, and I had problems with my Visa. Because I was on SSDI I couldn't marry her because if I married someone who was not on SSI or SSDI I would lose my disability benefits. At times I would get very depressed, and this doubtlessly contributed to problems in our relationship.

 I must say more about the regulations not allowing people on SSI or SSDI to get married. The regulation states that if someone is on SSDI or SSI and they get married to someone who is not on SSI or SSDI that they will automatically lose their benefits. This strikes me as a throwback to 19th century eugenics when disability was thought as something somehow contagious. Disabled people were thought of as people who should not be allowed to breed with non-disabled people and people thought disabled people should not be allowed to live a normal life. The fact was if I got married I would lose all of the $915 SSDI payment  that I depended on to live. I had previously been on SSI where you aren't alIowed to be out of the USA more than a month and you only get 733 dollars a month as an individual. With SSDI at least they let you travel.

I ended up having to leave Germany and go to Turkey and Lily and I ended up in a long distance relationship.  Long story short I spent a year in turkey and my depression got worse. Istanbul is a beautiful and incredible city with a rich culture but I missed Lily. In the end my relationship with Lily was not able to endure the separation we had because we were only able to see each other 3 times the whole year. By the end of the year she ended up deciding to leave me for another man and I decided that I needed to get as far away from Europe as possible.

After the breakup, I went through an intense depression and was often suicidal. I knew I needed help with my depression and my teeth were in very bad condition. I needed to get over ten teeth pulled and get partial dentures. Many of my friends and family were deeply concerned about me and many suggested that I return to the United States.  I knew that I needed help and I knew that being on SSDI I was entitled to Medicaid benefits that would cover all my expenses. At the same time returning to the United States did not seem like a feasible alternative to me because my SSDI payment was only $10,980  a year which was below the poverty level.

 I decided to do what I had always done before and go as far away as possible. I chose Bogota Colombia because South America has always seemed really interesting to me. In Bogota, I met some really great people but my depression was really out of control. I was often suicidal and I was aggressive and alienated a lot of people. It didn't help that I couldn't speak any Spanish. After 6 months I had burnt out on Bogota. My friends and family again suggested that I move back to the USA.  I again felt that I couldn't afford to live in USA on my SSDI and I felt trapped. I felt that I might be better if I move to Mexico City. At least I would be able to afford to live.

  In he first month I was in Mexico City I was enthralled with the energy of the city and I thought that my decision to Mexico City had been the right one. After a while, however my depression returned. I was doing everything to try to be active. I would go to the gym, went out out to meet people, and I took Spanish classes. Despite all this I was still very depressed. During this time my sister, father and my friends  suggested that I should be on meds. This was an idea that I had been against all of my life because I had some bad experiences with medication during my adolescence and I always felt that if I could put myself in the right situation that I would be happy and I just had to keep searching and struggling for the right situation. I never found what I was looking for but just kept going in circles. I began to open to the idea that medication might be able to help me.

 After being in Mexico for 6 months, I had to leave the country to renew my tourist visa. I decided to go to New York because it was the city in the world where I had the most friends and because it was  cheap to fly there.  I had a great time in New York seeing friends that I hadn't  seen for 5 years. I returned to Mexico refreshed but after a month I became depressed again and I decided to return to New York and seek the help I needed. 

I headed to New York on the 3rd of August at 10:30 p.m. and my friend Kristen picked me up from the airport. The next day I went to United Cerebral Palsy in Manhattan to see if I could get any help.  I figured that United Cerebral Palsy would be a good organization to start with because I had Cerebral Palsy myself. When I arrived at the office I was told to fill out paperwork while he staff found the woman I was supposed to talk with. When this woman arrived she was very cheerful and idealistic and explained to me that in order to get help from UCP I would need to go to the Office for People with Developmental Disabilities of New York State and  and be evaluated as having an IQ of less than 98.   I knew I didn't qualify for this because I had a master's degree in philosophy and had completed two years of PhD work. I asked her why you have to be certified as developmentally disabled in order to get help from UCP, when cerebral palsy was a disability that often hindered people's ability to work physically and not mentally. She told me that she disagreed with it too but that the majority UCP's funding came from OWPPD.  At the end of the meeting she gave me a list of organizations that help with low income housing.

The next day I called all the numbers he gave me and the majority said I would have to be referred from the Department of Homeless Services and that would require me to be in a homeless shelter for 2 to 6 months before I could be referred to housing. The homeless shelters in New York City seemed pretty rough and I didn't think that with my disability that I do very well in them. Some of the places I called suggested that I could be referred to them By a mental hospital. I called some other organizations like CIDNY (Center for Independent Living New York)  but I ended up in a game of phone tag. I figured it would be better if I went down to their office.

When I went to see CIDNY,  I had to wait a bit in the waiting room, but in about an hour I was sent to the office of the social worker. The social worker gave me a lot of useful information, like how to renew my Medicaid, how to apply to NYCHA housing and section 8, and she gave me a list of affordable housing throughout  New York. Unfortunately, the NYCHA  waiting list was  several years long, but I signed up. The Section 8 waiting list  had been closed since 2009  and was not accepting new applicants and unfortunately the majority of the affordable housing options on the list that  I was given were Section 8 only. The other apartments that were listed range from $600 to $800 a month plus deposit and that was too much for me to pay because I only got $915 a month with my SSDI.

 During this time, I was also struggling with places to sleep. Initially I stayed with Kristen , who was a professor of psychology and needed space and could only put me up for a week. After this I went to my friend Justin’s place and he said I could probably stay for 3 or 4 days but I had to leave after two days because the landlord’s mother lived downstairs and his roommate was afraid that if I stayed any longer the landlord would raise their rent. I was getting nervous and depressed and I was wondering if I should have stayed in Mexico City were at least I could afford to live. The night after I stayed at Justin's I ended up sleeping in the basement of C squat , which was a punk squat in the Lower East Side, but they made it clear that I could only stay there one night.  Thee next day I wandered around New York City looking for a place to sleep until I got a call from my Mexican friend Amilicar,  who told me I could stay with him for a week.

 Amilicar’s place was in Washington Heights and the hospitality him and his brother offered was great. After a week the brother was working again and his kids would be staying with him so I couldn't stay there anymore. I contacted some friends on Facebook who said I could stay with them but they didn't respond.

 I ended up sitting on the street in Bushwick, Brooklyn with nowhere to go. My move to New York to seek help had failed.  In the last month that I was in New York my depression and anxiety had not improved. I was in constant fight or flight mode and now I was about to be homeless. I had gone through cycles of being suicidal for years and I knew I was about to enter another one. I needed help immediately.

I decided that I needed to check myself into an emergency room that night and get myself into a mental hospital. I talked to my friend and asked him what would be the best hospital to go to and he said Columbia Presbyterian so I took the train to 168th Street and Broadway.

I got off the train and  into the emergency room.  I told the receptionist that I was depressed with suicidal thoughts and they had me sit down for about 5 minutes. I was then called into the back room by a nurse where they examined me and asked me some questions. They had me change into hospital clothes and took me to a bed where I stayed for about 7 hours.  I slept a bit, watched some TV and wondered what would happen next.

After 7 hours, I finally got transferred to Columbia Presbyterian’s Mental Health ER. After being interviewed by an intake nurse, who asked me why I had come, I ended up in a large room that was full of beds. I was in the mental health ER for about 30 hours but very little happened there. I mostly slept, watched TV, and called my friends to let them know what was going on. At this point I wasn't on medication. I was interviewed by a doctor two times. Two things that happened there which were strange was once I was awakened by an elderly Hispanic woman rubbing my face and  another  time there was an African American male who started pacing around the room and ranting  that he wasn't supposed to be there. When he started yelling damn cracker, and I was the only white person in the room, I knew it was time for me to leave the room and make a phone call.

The next day at 1 o'clock in the afternoon the ER transferred me to another hospital they had on 238th Street and Broadway. They took me away on a stretcher.   When I got to the other hospital I was served plain rice and vegetables. After that I went to sleep and later I  hung out a bit before the next meal. 

 It is hard to stress how little we did in the mental hospital.  Really a lot of the time was spent sleeping, playing cards, or watching TV. Almost all of us were on meds of various degrees and I was on Citalophram to help with my depression. Every day there was gym or ti chi and I always attended these because physical activity always makes me feel happy. There was one group a day but it was centered on rehab issues so I didn’t go.  The whole day in the hospital was basically centered on the meals and people in general ate a lot.

I spent most of my time hanging out with the Latino women in the hospital . There was extremely bright and cheerful Peruvian woman named Amelia, a Dominican woman named Victoria who was very friendly and a very motherly Dominican woman named Maria.  They all  basically took me under their wings and we would spend time talking, laughing, and playing cards. Being with them gave me a chance to practice my Spanish and it made it a lot easier to go through this difficult situation when I had such friendly people around me.

Occasionally people got volatile in the hospital. There was an elderly black man who would go on biblical and islamophobicrants and  one time there was a fight.  The mental hospital was a place where people were dealing with a variety of conditions from depression to paranoid schizophrenia and it made sense that some people just cannot handle it all the time. I made friends with a young  pregnant black girl who heard voices and sometimes would  freak out but at heart she was very kind and intelligent.

Almost every day I was able to see the doctor and she had made the suggestion that it might be possible to be referred to some kind of housing from the mental hospital.  The meds had been working and I figured if I could find a place in NYC and be around my friends that I would be pretty ok. It took me almost 4 days to see a social worker  and when I finally spoke to her she informed me that the only thing that the hospital could do was refer me to Bellevue homeless shelter. Two years before she said it would be possible to refer me to an organization that could find me housing but the laws had changed since then and now that is impossible.  Bellevue homeless shelter has a very bad reputation and as a person with a disability  I didn't think  it would be the most healthy environment for me.

Ein Winter im Berlin

I arrived in Berlin at the Ostbanhof, which was the former main train station of East Berlin. I arrived on an overcast day on a train on the banks of the river Spree.  I was going to stay at the Kőpi, which was the biggest and oldest Punk squat in Berlin. Upon arriving in the station, I could see the Kőpi from the other side of the river. It was the 1st of December.

  I walked across the street and went to the courtyard of the Kőpi. It was a building covered in Punk and anarchist graffiti. I had never seen anything like it. When I first arrived, no one was around. So I sat outside and smoked cigarettes. It was very cold and I shivered while I waited. Finally someone came out of the building and I asked him if he had seen Katja, who was my contact at the Kőpi. He said no, he had not seen her, but he invited me in. I helped him and his girlfriend set something up inside and we cooked breakfast and made coffee. After a while, it was clear that Katja was not around so they told me to come back later. I walked around Kruezberg a bit. When I came back, Katja took me into the guest room but it turned out to be occupied. A nice girl in another room offered to put me up for a night in the kitchen. I went to the bar in the Kőpi to hang out for a bit.

In the morning, I knew that I had to move to the Schwarzerkanal, which was a feminist and queer trailer park, because there wasn't really a space for me the Kőpi. I had some coffee and then headed one kilometer down the road to a grassy field on the river Spree. There I found the Swarzerkanal.

  The trailer park was filled with trailers that had been converted to living spaces and had wood stoves in some of them. Some of them were small but others were quite spacious. I was shown to my trailer which was very small but nice. I was the only man there. I ended up making friends with this woman named Willow from Wales.   We often talked at night but after a week she left.

The nights were very cold in Berlin. Even though I had a wood stove, it was never enough.  I always ended up shivering myself to sleep and then sleeping in really late. I spent most of my nights at the Kőpi at a punk show or watching a movie. Sometimes I would spend my time going to different places in Kruezberg, like the New Yorck which was an activist center near where the wall used to be, or to the Trinktueffel which was the oldest punk bar in Berlin.  Sometimes I would just read by candlelight in my trailer and listen to music.

I would try to be social and talk to people over coffee at the trailer park but sometimes people would just straight-up say that they do not want to talk to me. The whole time I was there I basically tried to stay out of people's way. I took no food from the common food. I kept asking if there was anything I could do to help but every time I asked people would say there was nothing for me to do.  In the end I ended up getting blamed for not helping enough and people said that I should know what to do without asking to help. This was probably true but at that time I was completely green and clueless to the squatting culture. On the 14th of December, I asked people if they wanted to go out with me for my birthday but no one wanted to. I ended up going to the Trinktuefel and drinking with this girl who also had her birthday that day.

A couple days before Christmas Schwarzerkanal informed me that I would have to be out before Christmas because some friends of theirs were coming to visit. The day before Christmas I spent the whole day walking around to all the squats in Berlin which I had found in the Stressfaktor, a publication that lists all the squats and punk and anarchist events in Berlin. I went to places all throughout the city to ask them if I could stay. I kept on getting rejected.

  My last stop that day was at a vokű, a community meal, at the Ballast der Republik on Brunnenstrasse. I arrived at the punk squat at 8 and got some food and had a drink. I noticed most of the people at the punk squat were Polish or Eastern European.  The people at the bar were very open and friendly but a little bit crazy. It was a lot different from other squats in Berlinwhich tended to be more subdued. After I washed my plate and ordered another beer from the bar, I ended up talking to the bartender, a blond man from Poland in his 40s. I asked him if I could stay some weeks in the squat. He said that it shouldn't be a problem and he introduced me to some of the older polish punks. These punks had founded the squat in the early 90’s.

  The bartender told me to ask a heavyset Punk with a large nose ring if I could stay at the squat and he said it was fine. I ended up hanging out with everyone for a couple hours. They told me how the Polish punks had founded the squat after the Berlin wall had fallen.
  The next day I moved into the Ballast der Republik. I was on the first floor in 1 of three five-floor buildings that comprised the squat. I shared the room I was staying in with a Lithuanian Punk couple. The girl was in her early twenties and the guy was in his mid-thirties. The man was very funny, impulsive and often drunk. The girl was very serious and up front but kind. They had travelled Europe together. The last place they had lived was Amsterdam.


 At the squat on Bűnnenstrasse, the toilet was on the bucket flush system. This meant you had to pour a bucket of water down the toilet to flush the toilet, but at first I didn't know how to use it. When I first got there, I would pee in the bucket because I didn't think the toilet worked. I happened to mention this one time to my roommate. They told me, “That is not how this is done” and laughed hysterically. They told me that sometimes a girl washed her hands in the bucket.
The place was pretty Bohemian with groups of people showing up in the middle of the night to hang out and old punks painting pictures in the kitchen. One of the punks was raising puppies. I spent a lot of my time there reading Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine which is an extraordinary book that describes how politicians and businesses use times of disaster and crisis to manipulate poor countries and people. Sometimes the Balast der Republik had concerts; these concerts were always wild.

 I would often be alone and on New Year's Eve I happened to find myself alone. The saying about New Year's Eve is there's always pressure to have a good time because it's supposed to be the happiest day of the year but I've often found that this pressure often leads to disappointment. I was alone and I wanted to have fun so I ended up going to every bar that looked interesting. I would have one drink and then move on to different bars. This was going pretty well. I love to dance so I was dancing with girls here and there but I was just dancing to dance and I wasn't trying to hit on anybody.
  Everything was fine until I ended up at a bar on the Rigaerstrasse. At this bar, they were playing some 80's music and I was dancing with this girl. Again, I was not hitting on her. All of a sudden, I find myself on the floor and this guy with a bald head is above me kicking me in the ribs. I get escorted out of the bar and I hit the bouncer on the way out. He did not hit me back. At the ubahn station I run into one of the girls I was dancing with and she said that they shouldn't have done that. I stumbled back to the squat and made it back into my room. I took a drink out of what I believed was an orange juice bottle but it turned out to be my roommate’s piss. I spit it out and I went to sleep. I could hardly move for the next couple of days.

 Even before my New Year's Eve misadventure, it was clear that it was best if I moved on from the Ballast der Republik. On Christmas Eve, I ate a Christmas meal with the residents of Reichenberger 63a.  When I walked into the place, I passed by antifa graffiti. The corridor to the courtyard was filled with a group of Turkish teenagers smoking weed.The place was not as punk as the Ballast der Republik and consisted mostly of German leftist and a few international guests. The dinner was very delicous. At the end of the night, I got into a very interesting conversation about the intersections between queer and disability theory. Everyone said that I could stay there after January 5th.

  The 3rd of January was one of my last days at the Ballast der Republik. There was a party at the bar. I was hanging out with some of the Polish punks and the Lithuanian punks who shared my room with me. I was going to leave the squat the next day and I wanted to make my last night at the Ballast der Republik a great one.  Everyone was in great spirits. We were all a bit drunk. The bar was playing classic German Punk songs and a lot of people were singing along.
 All of a sudden, a group of German punks came in. They were all a little bit rowdy. One of them was a cute blonde German girl with blue eyes named Lina who was with her brother who was wearing a police hat as a joke and then there was a girl with black dreadlocks. A lot of the Polish punks started to flirt with the girls but I hung back and drank my beer.

  After a while, I needed to get a new beer and I found myself at the bar next to Lina. We started talking to each other and making jokes and laughing. After that, we started dancing and then we kissed. I told her that I liked her energy. And she told me that she liked me too. I asked her why and she told me she liked me because I was different and because I liked her. We moved into the stage room where they were playing German pop music from the 80s and Punk. We continue dancing and kissing. She told me that I kissed too fast and that I should slow down and enjoy it. I listened to her advice. She was a fantastic kisser and I was really enjoying it. She told me that just because we were kissing it didn't mean that we would have sex. I told her I was very happy just kissing her and I meant it. The last thing I remember was her giving me her number and email. I kept it in a safe place.

The next day I move to the Reichenburger 63A and I had a really big room on the top floor. That day I wrote Lina and told her that it was fantastic meeting her and that I really wanted to see her again. A day later, she wrote me back. She told me that she was really surprised I had written her after the way she had behaved. Apparently one of the Polish guys had grabbed her friend with the dreadlocks in the crotch and Lina had gone off about how she hated all men. I absolutely did not remember that. She was really glad that I had written her because she had really liked me and thought I had behaved like a perfect gentleman. I told her that that was the only time that it was fortunate that I had blacked out. We arranged to meet in two days time at a concert at the Ballast der Republik.

 After two days, I went to the Ballast der Republik to meet Lina. I arrived early and hung out with my friends there. The concert was supposed to start at 10 and that was the time I was supposed to meet Lena. I was fucking nervous so I got a little bit drunk. 10:30 passed and Lina still hadn't shown up so I went to the concert room. I thought Lina had stood me up. I was trying to enjoy myself. The music was really good and my friends were there. 30 minutes later Lina showed up and she was as nervous as I was. She had been looking for me for 15 minutes and she thought I had stood her up. We immediately kissed. We danced a bit and grab a couple of drinks. We then decided that we should have some time alone and I asked the Lithuanian couple if we could stay in their room. They said yes.

We went into my old room and started kissing but I wanted to do more and she wanted to do more. When I made a move to escalate, the Lithuanian Punks walked in. She then said we couldn't do anything because we were not alone. After awhile of just kissing, she asked me if I wanted to go up to the kitchen and fuck. I followed dutifully.

Unfortunately I was quite drunk and I had whiskey dick. I ate her out  and she came several times. After a while, I asked her if she could suck me. She was going at it for a couple minutes when a bunch of people walked into the room. We got dressed really quickly and drank some coffee with the people and ate something. She whispered to me that it made her excited that they knew what we were doing when they walked in. We hung out together for a little bit and then went to bed in each other's arms.

A day or two later I was going to go to Ireland. I wrote her that I would like to see her again and then she wrote me back that she would like to see me too but unfortunately she could not because of school but that she would remember what we did before she went to bed.

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.

   

Prague

 I left Berlin in a haste.  I woke up about noon, very quickly packed my suitcase, and I took a taxi to the central bus station.  I then boarded the bus to Prague.  I was feeling a bit sad and yet I felt grateful for what had happened to me in Berlin.  I had been deeply touched by my experience with Lilly, but I thought that I had ruined any chance of seeing her again by being too paranoid and weird.

  The bus trip was about four hours. When I got in to Prague, I took a cab to the house I would be staying at and rang the doorbell.  At first no one answered so I went next door to get some pizza and beer.  Finally, the others from my TEFL course came home and I greeted everyone.

  I was immediately struck by how beautiful Prague was.  Although it had a lot of tourists, it retained a fairytale like quality with its cobble stones, gothic buildings, and castles.  The first night I was there I sat on my balcony, smoked cigarettes, listened to David Bowie’s the Rise and Fall of Ziggy Sardust and marveled at the ambiance of the city.

  During my month in Prague, I spent most of my time engaged in intensive and extremely informative classes on the art of teaching English.  When I was not learning, I would often go to the pub with my classmates and teachers, walk around exploring the city, and on the weekends I would usually go to a punk show.  I felt that my life was beginning anew.

  In the group of students we had at Oxford TEFL Prague were people from the United States, the United Kingdom, Prague, Australia and Ireland.  My closest friends in the program were John and Johanne who were both from Belfast.  John was in his late thirties, was very intelligent and had a terrific sense of humor.  He was married to a Czech diplomat who had been the Czech ambassador to Spain.  We spent many evenings in pubs were we exchanged stories, had pints and told jokes.  He had been involved in the punk scene and he went with me a couple times to the punk pub in Prague which had become like a second home to me.  It was where I would go to write my lesson plans, read and chat with the locals.

  Johanne was in her early 20s and we would often go to the pub together with Helen from the UK. Johanne would include me when the girls from the program would go out and we would go dancing together with Helen in clubs in Prague.  The music was really poppy and the scene was generally a lot of college students.  I normally would have felt uncomfortable at a clubs like these, but with Helen and Johanne it was a joy.  Johanne seemed to turn every experience into one of mirth and curiosity.

  At night I would often go to the Charles Bridge, which is the most touristy site in Prague, to listen to music and drink by myself. At night the bridge was almost empty and the view of the city lights over across the river filled me with wonder and refreshed me as I contemplated the journey I had only just begun.  Charles Bridge at night was my sanctuary.

  On the weekends, I would usually go to punk shows.  Most of the shows were at Klub 007 which was on the other side of the city.  The first time I went to a show there I was standing at a bus stop trying to get to the show and I was completely and utterly lost.  A punk girl named Veronika saw me and she could tell that I wanted to go to the punk show, so she called me over to her. I spoke no Czech and Veronika spoke almost no English so our communication was done through mostly gesturing, tone of voice and facial expressions.  She seemed very kind and I got on the bus with her and went to the gig.

  Once we got to the venue, there where about 50 punks sitting outside the club drinking and Veronika introduced me to all her friends.  I was immediately struck by how friendly and relaxed the punks were.  I was welcomed by everybody, even though there was definitely a language barrier and we laughed and talked on the stairs outside the club. That night the Klub 007 played crust punk and hardcore.

  In this period, I was in contact with both Diana and Lilly. Diana, who I had known for one month in New York, was in Slovakia. I let her know that I was in Prague and I asked her to please come visit me. She replied that she would come to see me the weekend before my graduation.   Lilly, whom I had met at the punk festival Resist to Exist in Berlin just prior to coming to Prague, I had kept in contact with via Facebook. Lilly had told me that she would come visit me after I finished my program and would stay the whole week with me.  Lilly’s mother had had doubts about her coming to visit me but her father who had been a truck driver and travelled all over Europe had encouraged Lilly to go to Prague and visit me. 

  The day Diana was to arrive I was very nervous. The month I was with her in New York had been very important and it had saved me from falling into an extremely dangerous depression after my mother had died. A couple of months after she left New York we had a bit of a falling out after she got upset at me because my depression over my mother’s death continued to be intense after Diana left.  A part of me hoped that Diana’s visit would bring a continuation of the romance we had when she was in New York, but I had no idea how she felt and I was still a bit upset about how she had reacted over my grief about my mother’s death.

  When Diana arrived at the bus station, she was an hour late.  I really wanted to hang out with her and I was hoping that she would stay the night with me. When we met, she told me that she was too tired to hang out and that she was going to go stay with a friend of hers.  I was a bit annoyed about waiting an hour just for a 15 minute reunion, but we agreed to meet the next day.

  The next day we met at a metro station on the other side of the river.  We then went to buy some alcohol and we walked to a place where there was a green space with some bushes, trees and lots of empty bottles.  It was clear that this was a favorite local drinking spot. We sat on one of the big rocks.  It was very hot and sunny and we were both sweating.  Diana had some homework to do and we were only able to talk intermittently.  I felt a bit strange because this was not how I had anticipated meeting again with Diana would be.  We had had such a great month together in New York and now she was very distant.  It was blatantly clear that anything remotely romantic was out.

  I was glad to see Diana, but I had never really gotten over how she had reacted over my prolonged grief over my mother’s death.  I had intended not to make a big deal about this and to patch things up with her, but the distance she was showing was reigniting my hurt. The alcohol and sun were not helping.  My anger was festering and I knew that I had to confront her.

  Her friend, who was also her ex-boyfriend, showed up and we decided to go to a park.  At this point, I was stewing and pretty silent.  We sat down and started to drink. I decided to confront her.  I told Diana that it had been really insensitive that she had told me I had to get over my mother’s death so shortly after it had happened and then to hardly speak to me when I couldn’t.  She told me that she was not sorry and that she would do the same thing again.  I was really angry and overwhelmed and started talking in circles.  Diana got tired of this and left with her friend.  I then went to a pub where John and some of my other friends where drinking.  I was very drunk bust I mostly kept silent the whole night.

  I finished my TEFL program. Lilly was to arrive the next day and we planned to spend a week together.  We both would have no obligations so we would be free to take our time to explore Prague together.  I was beyond excited but I was also extremely nervous, especially after what had happened with Diana.  What if Lilly did not feel the same as she did in Berlin? I thought this was very possible since I had acted very strange and insecure the last night I had seen her.  I had never had such an amazing experience with a woman as I did the night I was with Lilly, so I was a wreck thinking about how she felt now.

  The next day she was to arrive at 9 PM and I would meet her at the bus station.  I didn’t have a phone at the time so we prearranged everything on Facebook.  I was on edge the whole evening so I drank a little bit before meeting her.  At 830 I went to meet her at the bus station.   

  The bus station in Prague is very big and confusing and I ended up walking in circles a couple of times.  Finally I found the place where Lilly’s bus was supposed to be and Lilly ran up to me and kissed me with violence and tenderness.  I was ten minutes late and her bus had been ten minutes early.  She had been afraid that I wouldn’t show up and that she would be stranded in a strange city where she didn’t know anyone or understand a word of the language.

  A spark of tremendous joy reignited when we saw each other and we kissed several times and held each other’s hands as we walked to the metro.  Any worry I had had previously evaporated. I was profoundly happy.

  When we got back to my place, the twilight of the dusk was still visible from my balcony; a gorgeous mix of blue and orange dotted the beautiful silohette of Prague.  I put on Iggy and the Stooges’ album Raw Power. The music perfectly fit the exuberance and desire that Lilly and I were feeling.  I sat on a chair by the balcony and she sat on my lap facing me and we began kissing and exploring each other’s bodies.  The kisses we shared were both tender and passionate and wild yet sensitive.  Once again, I was struck and even overwhelmed by the intensity of her beauty.  We both very quickly became aroused and we turned the lights out and closed the curtains.

  The sex we had was had moments of animalistic passion and yet with the deepest sensitivity and tenderness.  After sex like that, we felt that we simply had to go out and explore the city together.  We both had been overwhelmed with wonder by each other and we had to follow the pulse of the feeling.  I grabbed some wine, my IPod and speakers and we headed out to the Charles Bridge together.

 We sat  on the bridge as we looked at the light of the city and danced  and kissed.  We listened to the Circle Jerks and Linton Kwesi Johnson and talked about anarchism and punk.  The connection that we had started in Berlin was blossoming.  We were free to be crazy, drunk, honest, and laugh until we almost couldn’t breathe.

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