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.
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