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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