no.1 „sleeping next to boys“

When my teenage self first dreamed about having sex with another person it would have been shocked to know it was gonna be with a fifty-year-old living in a shared apartment next to a dozen ZZ Top posters. But then again: who actually gets the first time they’ve been dreaming of? Growing up in Dusslingen - a small German town where most of the world’s supply of toilet cubicles is manufactured - wasn’t particularly hard or exciting. There was a gay banker who was seeing the one gay restaurant owner and in this part of rural Baden-Württemberg ‚the gays‘ were still easily recognizable by a small silver ring on their right ear. Anyone with a knack for nostalgia can just go back to my hometown, where the nineties are alive and kicking.

Nevertheless I managed to find someone. He was short and blond and had weirdly long fingers that he kept cracking while we were walking through wheat fields in late summer. It was a gosh dang love story. Except that he wasn’t in love with me. One evening when we were seventeen he invited me to spend the night. We watched “Wetten, dass…?” with his parents and I loved them. They were good Christian parents who actually seemed to like each other. We went up to his room. I looked at everything like precious metals from a distant planet. He had drawn a small cartoon cat on his bedroom wall which I thought was totally baller. He showed me some melancholy music and when I thought I was about to burst from happiness he lay on the floor and feel asleep on his hand. I took a picture of him dozing off. It was everything, but I never got closer to him than that. Intimacy briefly waved at me and then walked in the other direction fast. He was straight and deeply infatuated with a girl. I realized then and there that the whole romance thing was gonna be a bumpy ride.

My whole life I had been sleeping next to boys, in cars, train compartments, on field trips, in tents, during sleepovers, and there was never anything more than platonic touch. Something had to be done. Action I asked for and action I received. The desired spread came in form of a digital innovation like mana from heaven: the online dating app.

In a village a few kilometers north of my rural hometown I connected to someone. His name was Detlef. He had a shaved head, grey eyebrows and artificially tanned skin. With him being 35 years my elder and a somewhat fetish version of Mr. Clean it’s not hard to figure out how it all connects to my father having abandoned me. But like a heat-seeking missile I roar right into these Freudian hyper-clichés, wreaking as much havoc as my primitive psychology allows. A little reminder: I am 18 years old and worlds away from the smallest amount of self-reflexion when I enter Detlef’s shared apartment and face his classic rock posters. I am still thinking that this is nothing but fun, that this is right and the only way to go when I fuck this strange older man. His nipples are pierced and he turns red and grunts when he comes. He’s not someone I have known and cared about for a long time. He’s not the one and only man I’ll ever love. I don’t even know his last name. There are no candles. There is no bubbly bathwater and there are certainly no roses. Nothing about this is how sex ed said it would be. Except ejaculation.

When I go home that night it still seems like paying a visit to a friendly acquaintance. But when I discover he’s working at the local video store weeks later and both of us act like we’ve never met before as if by some unspoken pact it dawns on me that this whole thing had nothing to do with intimacy. That being close to someone physically doesn’t mean there has to be any closeness at all. To many this might seem naive. But bear with me. I’m just a small town boy who searched for love and found someone to fuck online.

no.2 „the last adult toy store“

If there’s anything I’ve learned from being raised by parents who were constantly divorcing it’s this: How to lie. Mother lied about how many new expensive pairs of jeans she bought and Father lied about seeing another woman. Even Brother was a natural: The amount of exams and swim classes he got out of by feigning stomach cramps is beyond comprehension to me to this day. There is no question: the art of lying runs in the family. I lied, too. Number one was actually number two. The real number one - my first sexual encounter with another human being - happened way before technology and apps entered my life and was something else entirely. And it all started with the eternal dharma bum: Jack Kerouac.

Like many young men I was devouring On the Road shortly before graduating High School. I wanted to do just like Jack did and travel the big ole United States. As a German citizen I needed a visa, and the nearest place that issued them was Frankfurt am Main. Germany’s only real big city with high rise buildings and a bustling drug market seemed like the perfect place to send an 18-year-old to brace himself for the New World. And Frankfurt lived up to its reputation as the modern German Babylon in every possible way. The first doorway I passed after stepping out of the train was inhabited by two small creatures heating up heroin on a piece of tin foil and the second one by a giant turd comfortably bedded in a merino scarf. It doesn’t get more Frankfurt than that.

Ten years after 9/11 the U.S. Consulate General had long established a rigid security routine that was completely natural to everyone who worked there. But for a naive country boy the measures applied seemed like that of a dystopian high-level-security-murder-prison, like something out of a Terry Gilliam movie. Since you were required to bring certain documents, but were not allowed onto the premises with anything other than those specific documents, you had to get rid of any bag, backpack, or even your house keys before entering. And since there was no wardrobe space inside the building - again, this was before you could enter the premises - you had to stop by a privately owned bakery (!) across the street to leave your bags and house keys (!!) with a random employee who gave you a handwritten number on a piece of paper as a security to get them back later. Besides this obvious madness things went pretty smoothly once inside; a three hour wait, ultra-expensive water bottles and someone in line farting in front of me notwithstanding.

With a brand new visa in my bag I took a cab back to Central Station and felt absolutely marvelous. I was a citizen of the world after all. There was still some time left until my train back arrived, so I had about an hour to kill but no clue about what to do in Frankfurt am Main. Walking towards Central Station, ready to settle down with a book on a park bench, I was stopped short by a big flashy sign that seemed not to belong to Frankfurt in the early 2010s but New York City in the late 1980s. The sign read: „Doktor Müller - Erotik Shop.“ Never since have I seen a sign that intriguing. What sort of a doctor was she? And what role did she play in the running of this sex shop? Naturally I went in. I came for the title, but stayed for the toys. It was pretty exciting to see nipple clips and silicone vaginas up close for the first time, but anyone would have been awed by the sheer quantity of dildos this place held. I had a feeling Doktor Müller’s heyday was long over, and her erotic shop was more of a storage space than a mercantile establishment. There were rows and rows of gigantic veiny plastic dicks, mostly in pink and dark orange, and hundreds of boxes of VHR tapes teaching me that „Icelandic Otter Boys“ were a fetish item. For all I knew all the other sex stores in the nation had long since closed and sent all their merchandise to this last stronghold of lust with only this one stubborn medical specialist remaining to guard the treasure and keep the failing body of sex shops alive.

As fascinating as it was, I had soon seen it all. I waved the very nice yellow haired Loveparade clerk goodbye and left. With one foot already out the door I turned around and realized: There was an upstairs. Right behind the counter there were steps leading to a dark red glitter door. The stairway was decorated with silver foil, so it reflected back your steps as you walked up. This must be a magical place I thought to myself and paid the entrance fee to what naturally turned out to be a pretty sleazy porn theater. I went in and sat down - there was not a soul around, it was about 3:30 PM on a Wednesday - watched for a couple of minutes and decided it was not for me. 

On my way out I saw there was another room. This one was again disco-themed like the stairway. But among the shiny mirrors and silver applications there was a single blue table standing in the middle of the room. I got curious. By the time I had circled the table twice and looked under it so as to check if it was part of some magic trick, a young guy came in. He was shorter than me by a foot, wore thick rimmed glasses and a blue basketball shirt. He looked like he had just skipped Algebra 2 and was being a bad boy. When he came closer I realized he was well over 30 and had the Down syndrome. I stopped in my tracks. Should I just go? Is this okay? Or are my thoughts what’s insensitive? By the time I asked myself these questions the man had lain down on the table and unbuttoned his pants. Leaving now would be insensitive. So I did the manly thing to do and took my first dick into my hands. I stroked it for a good minute and the guy seemed to enjoy it. I wasn’t really feeling much. Then I looked around at the silver walls, the 90s game show vibe of it all, and Suzi Quatro faintly roaring through the speakers downstairs, and suddenly I got very scared by that big city and by myself in it. Was I really The Wild One from the song as I liked to think? Or just a confused kid magnetically pulled to very heavy candy I wasn’t sure I could stomach? I took my hand away, left the poor aroused man on the table, stumbled back down the stairs out of the store and never turned around until I sat on the train back home.

If the American Government sent me to Frankfurt to get a visa and grow up a bit before I entered their challenging continent it may have worked a little too well. I see it as the equivalent of a father gifting his son a prostitute for his 18th birthday, which was once considered healthy for a young boy becoming a man. But what do I know, I’m not a Doktor Müller.

no.3 „through a mirror greasy“

When my friends kept telling me I looked different in every picture I took, my first thought was of course that I was a demon shapeshifter. But Father’s ancestors being from Denmark, and Mother’s from Hungary, the evidence that I actually was supernatural was pretty shaky. The next thought was that my friends were screwing with me. That they somehow set out to undermine my sense of self - unusually low in the first place - by way of doubting my appearance in pictures to cause my social downfall. But it turned out that I was not in the movie Mean Girls, that my friends were decent people and actually told the truth: I did look very different in every picture. I could see it myself now. In one picture I had a beak instead of a nose, in another black instead of dark blond hair, a third one showed my close blood relations to manatees and don’t get me started on the parade of lazy eye variations.

Hence when it came to picking profile pictures for the newly discovered dating app, my 18 year old self was at a crossroads. Should I present myself in the incoherent but more realistic way and choose five pictures from five different versions of me, ranging from a young Harvey Keitel to Gargamel the Evil Wizard? Or create a persona and carefully construct the romanticized visual narrative of something like an underage Aryan bricklayer who cooks four star dinners, obsessively plays the piano and feeds his body-temple on nothing but protein? Should I be honest and present an accurate picture or lie and sell the best version of myself? Opportunist pig that I am, of course I decided for the latter and once I started adjusting the pics and stats a little, there was no holding me back. In my online profile I grew several inches, lost dozens of pounds, started to speak Japanese fluently and had years of experience in the service sector. At the end of one afternoon on my computer I turned into a complete stranger. But a very attractive one. I was absolutely fascinated with the person I created. And so were „gayMaus84“, „theholinator“ and many more friendly avatars on the dating website. Alex, the only one without a nickname in his profile, immediately stuck out and caught my attention. He seemed perfect. Alex was 6’2’’, an active member of a rowing team, looked like a Persian Dream Prince, played the harpsichord for fun and as luck would have it also spoke fluent Japanese. That last information presented a bit of a problem, but I decided to cross that bridge when I got to it. If it actually came to a situation during our date when speaking Japanese was required, I could come up with something. I had seen hundreds of episodes of Sailor Moon after all. After a few easy lines back and forth, Alex and I decided to meet up in real life. He texted me his address and I was on my way.

Driving out to the neighboring town of Mössingen, famous home of the world’s most chlorinated public swimming pool, it finally dawned on me that Alex had done the same thing I did: He lied on his CV. How could someone living in the shadiest part of Grimm’s nightmare forest be something of an award-winning, harpsichord-playing Greek God? No way. I had been bluffed by my own trick. He had definitely lied in his profile. He had probably only flirted with taking up the harpsichord once when he was six, was on a fantasy rowing team which he made up of hundreds of miniature rowboat collectibles and 6’2’’ was the height of his mother, with whom he still shared a flat. I’b be lucky if he had teeth! Clasping my hands tighter onto the steering wheel, I pictured the worst possible outcome. When I finally pulled into his driveway, my expectations couldn’t get any lower. At this point I’d be grateful if he wasn’t gonna propose to cut off each other’s testicles and fry them. „Keep your head up!“ I told myself, that had happened several hundred miles away in a whole other part of Germany anyhow. 

I got out of the car and rang the bell. Just seconds later the neatly painted metal door revealed a casually dressed college student with dreamy eyes and a three-day stubble around almost Clark Kentian cheekbones. I got in and took off my shoes in the semi-darkness of the hallway. „So this was Alex, huh?“ I thought as I gave him the up-and-down. He was six feet one at the most, and his physique was nice, but was it princely as advertised? When he closed the door, led me into the living room and stepped into the light I had the shock of a lifetime and gasped a little: He was absolutely gorgeous. This was no Prince, here was a motherfucking King. While he prepared some drinks and casually asked me about my day, I realized that he was everything he made himself out to be. I looked around and inspected the medium-sized two bedrooms of his apartment, neither of which his mother lived in, and was completely intimidated by the tasteful interior. There was even a small rowing medal on one wall.

I was fucked. Here was this beautiful stranger inviting me into his home, and I wasn’t even sure I had told him my real name. I tucked away my belly fat and tried to place myself behind waist-high objects so he wouldn’t see my unshapely thighs. I made up a wild story about me being born on a Canadian oil rig instead of the local hospital that we could see from his house, and when he asked me how I found Creatine I told him I didn’t really collect rock-type Pokémon. I could tell he was starting to doubt the artificial persona I was desperately trying to uphold. But he didn’t say anything. He was too damn well-mannered. Polite perfect asshole… 

The charade went on, and as a gracious host he made light conversation for about an hour. At the end of the night he told me he wanted to show me something, and as we left the newly built modern living room led me through the old refurbished part of the house; with some parts dating back to the 16th century as I was informed. At the end of the half-timbered hallway we entered a room that had nothing in it except for a handful of old light brown dressers and cupboards. I wasn’t thinking much, as Alex sat down at one of the dressers and pulled up his sleeves. While I babbled on about high-strung subjects like the right temperature for pudding he folded out a wooden panel, exposed a white keyboard and with it the instrument that destroyed my last hope of getting through this night in one piece: a real-life harpsichord. After he stretched out his hands and played a wonderful melody by someone whose name I just can’t remember because my head is full of Miracle Whip jingles, the ever-smiling Alex asked me what I thought of his playing. In a desperate effort to save the last bit of my pretend sophisticated face I replied: „Watashi wa doitsu-jin desu.“ He looked at me nonplussed. „That’s Japanese,“ I said. „It means: ‚Your music fills my lung to the brim with magical breathe.‘“ (It doesn’t.) He put the wooden keyboard cover down and got up. „Sorry,“ he said, „I don’t really speak Japanese. But I guess everyone lies in their online profile, don’t they?“ He looked me in the eye and smiled, and in that moment I knew someone like me could never date a guy like him. Not because I was a 5’9’’ tall, unemployed teenager with an average body and hair in unfortunate places, but precisely for the reason that I acted like I wasn’t.

I left Mössingen and Alex and never met him again. From a young New Hollywood sex symbol to a grumpy old cartoon wizard, my significant other should get to know and like every version of myself, and not just the fabled Aryan bricklayer. But before that other person could do that, I myself should either master the Japanese language - or finally face some inconvenient truths.

no.4 „trombones“

I looked down and noticed that my hands were shaking. I had just passed through security at Stuttgart Airport after Mother broke out in tears and Brother waved at me from the other side of the glass walls. It was to be the longest period of time away from home and my family had driven me to the airport to say goodbye, but moreover to stop me from actually leaving on the 12-month-long trip through the United Stated that I had been planning for the entire last year. They did want me to spread my wings and travel the world, but worry was their natural mode of being. After I passed the gate and turned around one last time to see them grow smaller my hands began to shake. Not because I was afraid. It was the excitement of being completely and utterly on my own for the first time ever. I had just turned 19 and the world was my oyster. What country better to visit than the land of opportunity itself? My initial impulse was to do it like the first immigrants did it and travel to the New World on an actual ship. But spending four weeks on a freighter seemed a lot more romantic in the imagination and also on the plus side of boarding a commercial airplane was the delicious brandy British Airways served all through the six hour flight. So when I arrived in America a sloppy boozehound, I could really appreciate the beauty of Newark Terminal 4 and forgot all about the scenic transatlantic journey I had missed.

After biting my way through the Big Apple and marveling at a true Indian summer in New England, I decided to visit Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love. To use a mode of transport that befitted both the destination and my slim budget I hopped on a Greyhound, the Bus Carrier of Brotherly Love. Anyone who’s never ridden on one of their busses and witnessed two complete strangers sitting next to each other put a blanket over their bodies so they can have full-on sex in the back seat simply has not lived. A smelly guy with frosted tips asking you for water to take his medicine and a hunchbacked Rosa Klebb clipping her fingernails into your coffee are a close second and third on the list of magical Greyhound encounters. If you’ve ever wondered what God and Dante meant when droning on about Purgatory, here is a place on earth where you can witness it all first hand - for under 50 dollars a ride. But just as the saying goes even from the deepest darkest mud beautiful flowers grow, and mine was Matthew Murray, a short twenty-year-old with a blond buzz cut sitting two rows in front of me. Somehow we got to talking, about how I had just finished High School and started out on my trip and he had just begun studying music and composition at a conservatory in Philadelphia. When we arrived at the bus station and hugged goodbye, he stopped and asked me if I wanted to share a cab into the city. Some people would advise you not to trust a guy you just met on a Greyhound, but there was no needle sticking out of his arm AND he was wearing pants - that’s all I needed for trust.

We got to Philadelphia in the early morning hours, and crossed a bridge into Downtown at dawn. The cab stopped near an apartment building in Southwest City Center. We split the bill and got out. Again I hugged him goodbye. Again he stopped to think, and this time asked if I had a place to stay. I said no and he offered me to crash on his couch for a couple of days. „Oh my,“ I thought to myself, „these Americans are a lot friendlier than Grandma told me they would be.“ Then again she kept asking me if I had a girlfriend and told me never to drink alcohol, so where would I be if I listened to her? Stone-cold sober and married to a Protestant wife? No, thanks. So when Matthew Murray, a complete Irish-American stranger, asked me to sleep in his apartment I left the nagging voice of Grandma and all small town inhibition behind and had only two words for him: „Yes, please.“

These two magical words get you to the most marvelous places that you never thought you’d visit. Ever since Jane Lynch told an interviewer once that her career was built on her saying yes to almost anything it has become my own personal mantra. And if I became a tall lesbian comedic actress wearing a tracksuit to work most days by the age of 50 I’d consider myself lucky! So I followed Matthew to his walk-up apartment across the street, my huge 60-kilo-Deuter-rucksack banging on the walls of the tiny stairwell and getting tangled up in various railings on various floors. When we entered his medium-sized studio apartment I was surprised by how „nineties America“ it all was: everything was off-white, from the carpeted floor, to the huge comfy couch, the microwave oven and the aluminium Venetian blinds. And then the nineties vibe was reproduced in real life, when he offered me a Gatorade and we watched a couple of episodes of early Friends. He kept looking over to me and then looking back at the screen, somehow nervous. At this point, sitting on a stranger’s couch in the middle of the sixth-most populated city in the U.S. - which I had seen nothing of so far - I still imagined him reaching for a knife behind us on the kitchen counter and stabbing me to death. Who would even hear me scream? There was no one else but Joey Tribbiani, and he had just put a book in the freezer because he was afraid of it. I know, him stabbing me was a ridiculous thought, but that’s the thing about these old nagging voices of Grandmas: they have raised you, and they cling to your synapses, because - in spite of their weariness of new experience - they have the desire to travel as well, within your mind and through your future actions. This was the first person I had met casually and without any agenda, that I had met in the real world, and the thought that this new person wanted to caress and not peel off my skin was entirely foreign to me. Thus the tension that I since came to enjoy and know so well, the tension of two bodies in anticipation, was undecipherable to me on this hot September afternoon in Philadelphia. 

Next to the television set there was a framed picture of Matthew in a park, his arm around the shoulder of another guy of the same height that was obviously his twin brother: they had the same big eyes, the same round face, the same milky pale skin. The only thing that was different was that his brother wore a pretty high white-fro instead of a buzz cut.

„That’s my twin brother, he’s also gay, which is totally weird cause you know, makes you think sexuality is connected to genetics,“ he said without taking his eyes off the screen. 

„You’re gay?“ was the only thing I could think of.

He smiled at me as if I was joking. „Don’t be so coy.“

Wiping sweaty palms on my jeans I asked „What does ‚coy‘ mean?,“ realizing only much later that that was the most coy thing to say in that situation.

He laughed. Apparently I had said exactly the right thing, because he did what I wanted most and leaned over and kissed me with his eyes closed. I couldn’t move. He gently pushed me down and lay on top of me, looking me straight in the eye, our faces only an inch apart.

„You’re funny,“ he said and gave me another kiss. „It’s your eyes though.“

„What about my eyes?“ I asked, still totally oblivious to what was going on.

„They’re what made me ask you to stay with me,“ he said in a matter-of-fact voice. I think that sentence is what made me break out of my nervous stupor. I put my hands on the small of his back and looked into his true, somehow very American green eyes and decided right then and there that saying yes to the unknown is one of the most beautiful opportunities we have, and can lead to a very different list of magical Greyhound encounters. After weeks of being separated from my family and speaking only to museum gift shop employees and bus terminal clerks there was finally a human connection, something like love from a complete stranger. Something that felt like home at the other end of the world.

Two episodes of Friends later we had sex. Afterwards we showered together and shared a small bar of soap, which was all the product he had and which I found intriguingly minimalist, but was probably all he could afford. We had sex again, and later that afternoon we went to his university to meet some of his classmates. I found out he was a trombone major, after I found out that as a music student you could pick an instrument to major in. Before I had imagined that all music students had to play the drums and throw chairs at each other in between classes, much like in the movie Whiplash. But these people from the Curtis Institute of Music were pretty chill and smoked a lot of pot. It helped that I was their age, and the fact that I was traveling on my own seemed to impress them a lot. As the sociology hobbyist that I was, one of my premeditated goals was to get to know the local youth. So I reveled in my success when I was invited to accompany Matthew and his classmates to a trombone concert the next morning outside of town. A real-life event that wasn’t part of any sightseeing tour, but planned by average U.S. citizens! That’s what I love about saying yes to almost anything: One minute you step out of a bus in Philadelphia and barely know what a trumpet looks like, and the next thing you know you cum on the soft white belly button of an Irishman and effortlessly distinguish between a valve trombone, a sackbut and a buccin. Life really is like a box of chocolates. And what followed was some of life’s sweetest candy. 

The next Saturday early in the afternoon we took off for the concert. Matthew’s friends drove an old rickety Toyota and during the 30 miles or so it took to get to the small town outside of Philadelphia they talked about Obama’s chances for re-election, tuition fees and yeast infections, and I couldn’t have been more excited to witness the wild American Student in their natural habitat, feeling like one of them already. So far I had to plan my stay in hostels, chase down some museum or famous sight to see, had met other Germans, Koreans or the odd Russian, and was overall living the life of a tourist. The concert and everything surrounding it was a relief to me. Stepping out of the Toyota in front of the early 20th century church with my new friends, listening to this lovely brass instrument for two hours, and after the show being introduced to the performers and Matthew’s fellow musicians felt thrillingly „normal“ to me. I was no longer a traveler or a German. I was one of them. Just another trombone enthusiast outside of Philly, Pennsylvania.

When we got back to the city it was almost dark. Matt’s friends dropped us off at a park near his apartment. I had my giant backpack with me, ready to hop on the next bus on to the next town. It was one of the hottest nights in the Northeast that year, so we decided to take a little walk. After a couple of awkward minutes and dodging to avoid somebody trying to sell us crack, Matthew took my hand. Immediately I pulled away, without realizing the scope of my action and how long it would take to fight that impulse so deeply buried in my subconscious. We both stopped.

„You don’t like PDA?,“ Matthew asked, with no sign of judgment whatsoever. 

„What’s PDA?,“ I replied, genuinely confused.

„Aw, you’re being coy again.“ He briefly smiled at me and walked on. He seemed to understand a lot more than I did. I actually wanted him to hold my hand, but I know now that it was in these precise moments that the spiteful schadenfreude-voice of Grandma was creeping back in: „So what now, huh? Do you see the dead end you’ve set yourself up for? See the comfort of staying put in one place and dealing with and loving the same set of people for all your life now?“

Standing in front of Matthew Murray in the park that hot September evening I couldn’t bring myself to kiss him. What kept me from acting in the present was worrying about the future. Worrying about how something happening now would make me feel later, about how on a trip like this I was only experiencing the beginnings of things, and never their middle and end. As he smiled and gently touched my elbow my heart skipped a beat, but it also made me think about the somehow repressed way I said goodbye to Mother and Brother at the airport. I thought about Matthew and I’s respective ancestors and the fundamental difference between them. His own - a short, red-nosed gang of leprechauns - exclaiming „Fuck this there’s not enough potatoes and the shingle roof is leaking let’s leave this shithole!“ and coming to America, while my own Prussian clan had just pulled their blankets tighter and kept struggling to make do on one cup of kraut soup for a family of thirteen. I understand now that in my days as a trombone lover I merely toyed with belonging to the former, while my upbringing still firmly anchored me in the realm of the latter. 

When the street lights went on Matthew said goodbye for the last time. He walked away to the other end of the park without looking back once, as if we hadn’t just lost something. Funnily enough, his Grandma’s voice was probably telling him he had just gained something.

no.5 „united colors of america“

„Pick one,“ said the unofficial master of ceremonies Dave „Patty“ Patterson, a quick-witted 300-pound political science major.

„Pick one?“ I asked in the large yellow common room/cooking area of the Christian Youth House hostel in Memphis, Tennessee. We were standing at the kitchen counter munching cold leftover waffles from breakfast, looking out at the thrillingly multiethnic group of students lounging around the room. There was guitar playing Mexican-American Matt, African-American business student James with the nice glasses, and Hoover, a short sociology major with a blue bandana wrapped in his black hair and Cherokee ancestry.

„To hook up with,“ Patty replied in a matter-of-fact voice, as if this was a regular Thursday night for the Southern American twentysomething.

„Is this the best Benetton commercial ever? Is everyone in this hostel gay??“ I asked Patty, unsure of what exactly I had just been offered.

As a reply Patty squeezed my shoulder and smiled at me mischievously - and I knew I had found a very special place.

Earlier that day I had typed in the words „hostel“, „memphis“ and „cheap“ into one of the first laptops ever designed, and pretty quickly came up with the most central and cheapest option: The Christian Youth House, according to their website “a ministry of hospitality and simple living at First Congregational Church located in Midtown Memphis.“ Being exceptionally skeptical to all things Christian, I had my doubts if this was the right place for me. But it was after all the cheapest option, and it had central heating! As I understood much later, Christian with a capital C in the name of a business didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the religious beliefs of the owner, but almost always equaled Funding with a capital F.

The second I stepped into the reception area/common room/kitchen area/every other conceivable purpose of a room of the Christian Youth Hostel I felt right at home. Patty introduced himself and explained the structure of the hostel to me. The whole building had about 60 beds, and the inhabitants were either short-term guests like me, staying for a couple of nights on their way through town, permanent residents who took a time out from their actual life or students enrolled at a local campus. The first group were jokingly referred to as „the shorties“, the second group lovingly called „the perms.“ No matter how long you stayed, everyone had to share the daily chores and hold a serious commitment to ‚a peaceful, welcoming, and grateful atmosphere.‘ Little did I know how serious the perms were about this statute. After a quick look around, Patty introduced me to the shorties Gerald and Debra, a sixtysomething Australian cowboy exploring the world and his female Alabaman platonic friend of twenty years who clearly had the hots for him. The perms were an exhilaratingly colorful set of every imaginable form a hipster in the early 10s could take. Hoover was the first to shake my hand and greet me with a „Guten Tag, wie geht es?“ in nearly fluent German. He wore his dark black shoulder-length hair in a bandana that matched his shorts, giving off the impression of an indigenous Coachella boy scout. Next was James, an African-American Memphis-born-and-bred startup founder who, after learning about my German origin, would only greet me with „Bonn y’all!“, a reference to the former capital of Germany, the city of Bonn, a useless piece of trivia he somehow had remembered from middle school. Libby was a pale girl with short blue hair relentlessly playing World of Warcraft. Matt, a rising Mexican country star, his girlfriend Martina, a woman of 19 waiting for a cosmic sign to finally launch her denim greeting card business, and about twelve cats rounded out the wonderful ragtag bunch that was to become my personal cast of Misfits for the night. Faced with a rainbow bouquet of ethnic diversity the best thing I could come up with was a moronic „Hi I’m Yannik, I’m white.“ Thank First Congregational Church it cracked everyone up as the hostel group saw I was well-intentioned and anxious to belong.

It was already late in the afternoon and my half-assed plans to visit the Civil Rights Museum and stroll down Beale Street were further thwarted by my inability to read the bus schedule. So I sat down with the bunch and the next thing I knew we got to talking about German television. I proudly told them about a dashing gentleman called Werner Schulze-Erdel hosting a show where two families competed to name the most popular responses to survey questions in order to win cash and prizes, and learned that it was based on an American show from the seventies. When I told them about a super fun show in which contestants were shown products and had to bid closest to the product's actual retail price they told me it was based on an American show from the fifties. During my third and last shot at earning an impressed gasp and saving my nation’s televisual pride I started telling them about a show in which a heavyset lady does interior design, before I was interrupted from three different sides. „Speaking of heavyset lady, have you ever heard of Paula Deen?“ „Ohmigod Paula Deen is INSANE!“ The whole room broke out in laughter. A computer screen was shoved under my nose and a manically grinning lady with high grey hair greased up a casserole dish in a cooking show that seemed to be one long love letter to butter. While I laughed harder than ever before and realized German television still had a lot to learn, I noticed how Hoover was grinning at me and James slightly touched my shoulder, accidentally on purpose. I loved these people instantly. They were the same people that traveled to foreign countries just to stay in the hotel room and see how Coca-Cola tastes different. A people that stayed in and talked about television shows rather than going out to see the pyramids.

Then suddenly the dynamic shifted. It was initiated by an „Oh well…“ from Patty that made everyone get up from the common area near the stove and move to the somehow more private armchair area over by the computers. At first glance this was merely a shift of about two meters, but when looking closely one noticed it was tectonic, dividing the shorties from the perms for the rest of the night. Gerald and his eternal platonic friend Debra said their goodbyes and went to bed, and there was this awkward moment when I aka the new guy stood in front of the already settled group of perms. Libby shot a glance at Hoover, and after a few seconds of silence invited me to join them in their traditional Thursday night routine: musical charades and six-packs of hard cider.

Ten minutes later everyone seemed drunk already and Libby unpacked some weed which she had to protect from about six of the cats constantly snatching at it. Martina and James heatedly discussed how Nietzsche’s Übermensch concept could apply in a church-funded Christian Youth Hostel, and Matt was baking cupcakes. Patty stood by the kitchen counter and gestured for me to come over. He spoke to me in a low seductive voice, playfully mocking the pimp position he was about to inhabit. He asked me to pick one.

„How do you like our boys? Which one would you like to get to know better?“ He asked after I still hadn’t answered. „I mean they all like you.“

„Really? All of them?“ I stood in amazement of the display in front of me. I had somehow stumbled upon a sexual candy shop of nations. „I don’t get it,“ I said. „How is everyone gay? I thought this was some sort of dogmatic religious place.“

„Oh Yannik,“ Patty patronized me. „You obviously don’t know a lot about the Church. Our house rules aim to incorporate Christian values - doesn’t mean you can’t have sex with whomever you want.“ Between the walls of the Christian Youth House the world really wasn’t black and white, it had many different colors. „Besides, it’s not like it’s Catholicism.“

I grabbed a fresh hot cupcake and nodded over to Hoover who sat in the corner and tied his hair in a bun. Patty understood. I sat in the desk chair pretending to pick a song. A moment later, Hoover came over, smiled at me and sat on my lap, picking the song for me.  He chose „Better“ from Regina Spektor’s 2006 smash album Begin to Hope. From the moment the first chorus set in, things moved in one direction only, as if the night was on rails. After about 15 minutes on my lap, the two of us visiting everyone in the room on our rolling desk chair, he asked me if I wanted to see the deck. I said sure, why not, and he led me outside to a little elevated wooden patio and leaned against the railing. We said nothing. Then he smiled and gave me a kiss. He tasted of lip balm and cigarettes, but in a good way. This part of Memphis, as I imagined every other part of the city was, too, seemed pretty deserted at night, and the only sounds were the swaying of two giant oak trees shielding the deck from the street and Hoover giggling at my already being totally baked from Libby’s weed. I kissed him one more time before he led me back inside and into his room. As one of the most senior perms he had a single room in the hostel, which was strewn with clothes, vinyls and Magic: The Gathering™ playing cards. We sat on the bed and made out. He took his shirt off, revealing smooth hairless skin and a tribal leather necklace on his breast. Suddenly he turned me around on my stomach and pulled down my pants. My eyes grew big. He bent down and talked softly into my ear: „Have you ever done this before?“

„Well, technically…“ I started saying before he cut me off.

„So no, you haven’t. That’s no problem. I’ll try to be gentle.“

He wasn’t. Well, to be fair, he tried to be, but being passive for the first time in your life involves about the worst pain you can imagine. I’m not exaggerating. One time I was hit between the eyes with a small garden rake and another time Father ran over my left big toe with a medium-sized tractor. I know physical pain. But believe you me, nothing compares to the agony of the First Anal Penetration. And you can quote me on that. So when Hoover tried once and I screamed my lungs out, tried a second time and I screamed even louder, he aborted his mission and came in his hand. Then he opened his laptop and we watched The Jungle Book. The 1967 animated version. It was such a weird transition from trying to have sex to watching a children’s movie, but somehow it felt very soothing. Lying there on Hoover’s bed, still naked, and watching Baloo rub his behind against a palm tree, I thought about the mysteries of that night. Had I just had anal sex arranged by an overweight missionary in a hostel in Memphis, Tennessee? In the grand scheme of things, what did it all mean?

Hoover was completely engaged with the jungle, so I excused myself, asking where the bathroom was. When I went out and closed the door behind me I was jolted by a strange elderly man I swore I’d never seen around the hostel before, sitting on a chair in the hallway right across Hoover’s bedroom door. He definitely noticed how much he had frightened me, but showed no reaction whatsoever. He just sat there and stared at me. I walked down the hallway and through the glass door out onto the deck, and as I turned around found him still staring at me. Maybe it was the weed, but I thought of this man as the silent voice of my personal guilt. Not the voice of the Aztec Quetzalcoatl, the Cherokee’s twin thunder brothers or Cameroon’s supreme creator god Zamba, but my very own „Hi-I’m-Yannik-I’m-white“-figure of mythology. Did I let myself get fucked just because a bored political science major said so? Should I have waited for something or someone ‚special‘, like some perfect partner whose last name I knew and whose first name wasn’t that of a vacuum cleaner? But on the other hand, if I waited for a sign from the Gods telling me when to have sex - like Martina and her denim greeting card business - I’d still be waiting today.

no.6 „my huckleberry friend“

Traveling a foreign country all by yourself can be the most thrilling experience, but in the dark moments you feel like you’re the only person left on earth. After months of traveling criss-cross through the United States, and, to be honest, extended periods of bitter loneliness, I had finally made it to the West Coast. There in San Francisco I saw the first familiar faces on my journey. Mother and Uncle flew over from Europe to pay a pre-Christmas visit to their long lost prodigal son and treat him to „the first real meal in almost half a year.“ 

I had been in town for a couple of days, and one sunny morning when they called me to say the arrived, I moved out of the 12 person dorm of my hostel and into a newly renovated lifestyle hotel that Uncle paid for. A rain shower and a single bedroom were a welcome change from the snoring and farting and sometimes incontinent bunch that stayed at hostels. My family thought of me as unwashed and underfed and so treated me like a king in that week in San Francisco. Every morning we had breakfast at a French café consisting of cappuccini, croissants and muesli bowls before we would venture out to Nob Hill, or Alcatraz or Ghirardelli Square in the fog, and live the life of carefree, modestly wealthy tourists. One day we walked across the Golden Gate Bridge and all the way to Sausalito till our feet were bleeding and Mother’s complaints could only be consoled by artisanal ice cream. Another day we would stroll along the streets of the Castro, passing the Starbucks they aptly dubbed „Bearbucks.“ When I noticed a couple of extremely attractive bearded men over 40 lounging around in front of the coffee shop staring at me I was truly walking on sunshine. With my family there I felt much more confident, like I wasn’t just a strange boy out in the world, but somehow legitimate. 

When they left after a whole week of sweet bliss and pretty much took my home at the end of the world back with them, I fell into a hole. The day I said goodbye and put them on a shuttle bus back to the airport it was the loneliest time I had on the whole trip. I desperately needed someone. To talk to, to be liked by, to be human with. Of course you meet about 23 new people every day when you’re staying at a youth hostel, but the way of meeting and communicating with all these different people is always the same. Where are you from originally? How long are you traveling for? Weird they don’t have sparkling water here, right? You can only go so far with a person you’ve just met and know you’re never gonna see again. I craved for a real connection like the one I had with my family during their visit. So I whipped out the old laptop and started looking for someone online. Preferably for sweet hugs and maybe a small kiss, but if there needed to be sex I could do that, too.

A bald and very friendly middle-aged Swede I found on GayRomeo, a dating app mostly used by Europeans that has since changed its name, invited me to his hotel room at the other end of town. To get there I had to take a streetcar on the most scenic route through the city imaginable. I almost burst from all the romantic excitement I felt hopping on a traditional San Franciscan streetcar. Riding up a hill with an almost full moon towering above the skyscrapers and the lushly decorated Christmas trees all over town made my eyes water. Under festive garlands and holiday lights the people of the most liberal city I had seen so far finished their holiday shopping and held gloved hands while ice-skating on a rink in the middle of some square. I was the only passenger that night, so the conductor was speaking directly to me when he asked what stop I wanted to get off at. It was a not-so classic gay Christmas fairytale with a twist, a migrating teenager riding a lonely streetcar up the hills of San Francisco on his way to have sex with a Swedish stranger in a hotel room in Fisherman’s Wharf. Armistead Maupin would be proud of me for experiencing such a love-letter-to-the-city kind of moment. „Fisherman’s Wharf!“ I yelled at the disturbingly good looking conductor a little too loud, betraying my status as an absolute beginner with this mode of transportation. Although I couldn’t have been further away from being a Bay Area native, I felt like one already. 

What happened at the destination couldn’t live up to the almost exhaustingly magical way there. The hotel turned out to be a motel, and the Swede turned out to be ten years older than he said he was. But he was in fact bald, no lies there. To tell the truth, he was actually completely bald, and I’m not just talking about his head. I couldn’t find a single hair on his whole body. It seemed like he didn’t even have eyebrows. I came all this way to find comfort, but the moment I stepped into his motel room I knew I wouldn’t find it there. The small red and white candy canes he had removed from the pillows and placed next to the miniature plastic Christmas tree on the desk. The silver wedding ring on his finger, his breath that smelled of too many coffees on a long work day at the office, an office that was thousands of miles away from home and probably just a temporary one on an upsetting business trip during the holidays. All these things, all these details made up a room that was full of emptiness. I realized that his intention for the meetup was exactly the same as mine. He’d had a long day at work far away from home and wanted a little tenderness. Funny how two people looking for comfort can end up creating even more loneliness together. So here I was getting down on my knees, trying to find some solace between the wrinkles of his smooth Swedish skin. 

The whole thing didn’t last very long, but once I left the motel it was well past midnight and the streetcars had stopped running. Better to walk back anyway to get a clear head in the surprisingly mild December air. I walked down a street and smelled my hands. I forgot to wash them and they still smelt of the Swede and his tired body. Suddenly I stopped in my tracks. A deep canyon appeared to my left, when I realized the cross street was on a different level than the one I was on. I looked down on the arched bridge I was standing on. A homeless person lurched about the first steps of the stairway that connected my level to the lower one, sorting bottles and trinkets from one plastic bag to another. A weird twitch next to my belly button made me startle and pull up my shirt and sweater. I touched the spot on my lower stomach and noticed the hairs were stuck together from the Swede’s drying cum. I looked back up on the looming high-rises, the yellow moon and the streets and walkways that seemed so much steeper on foot. Then I started to feel sick. I genuinely regretted having had sex. The unforgiving loneliness of the deserts, the gigantic cities and the snowy mountains I had seen rushed back over me all at once. It dawned on me that the purpose behind this whole trip had been to learn how to endure and accept that loneliness, and in cheating my way out of it by fucking a stranger I had rendered it even more powerful. 

The last three days in San Francisco were almost unbearable. I ran around like a widow searching for the ghost of her dead husband. I spent most of my time in shopping malls looking at larger-than-life wrapped gifts under twenty feet high Christmas trees. I had to get out of there. Anywhere. That third day after my family had left and I met the Swede I boarded a greyhound back east. On board there were the usual mix of students, Japanese ladies and the odd mother with child, but one thing was different. About a third of the passengers were Amish, and so was the man sitting in the seat next to me. Everything I knew about the Amish I learned from the movie Witness and that wasn’t much. I remembered they didn’t use fax machines, but neither did anyone I knew. I tried my best not to stare at the guy next to me and concentrated on my book. After a couple of hours he looked over at the page I was reading and said: „Huckleberry Finn, eines meiner Lieblingsbücher.“ My face fell. Then I started to grin. „Sie sprechen Deutsch?“ As I said: I knew absolutely nothing about the Amish. It turns out their ancestors were Alsatian and Swiss, so some of them still speak a derivative German dialect. It seems completely stupid and irrational, but this hatted and bearded man speaking my mother tongue on a greyhound bus in Eastern California gave me all the consolation I longed for.

„Don’t you think it’s a little episodic and… unconnected?“ I asked my Amish friend in German.

„Not at all,“ he answered. „It’s full of adventures.“

I couldn’t help but smile at him as the bus drove on into a setting Californian winter sun, our very own wooden raft on the river.

no.7 „voyager“

I have always been a person of extremes. All or nothing. Hot or cold. Overeating or starving. There’s no in between. And so, when I returned from an extended trip through the USA, the home of materialism, it only made sense to me to move to the former poster child of socialism: Eastern Germany. Coming back from a journey that showed me a big part of the American continent and cost me all the savings I had, the place I moved to next was supposed to fulfill only two small requirements. I wanted it to be as far away from home as possible and I needed it to be cheap. Very cheap. For anyone not familiar with the cost of living in various German places let me put up this easy equation. A single guy barely scraping by in the smallest apartment in Frankfurt am Main could sustain a family of six in the vast urban fields of Dresden. The states of the former German Democratic Republic had long since been incorporated into what we call Germany today, but landscape, people, and life itself were still heavily influenced by the old socialist dream. So when it came to choosing a college I looked at my very average grade-point average, then looked at my options on the map of Germany, back to my grade-point average, into my empty wallet, and back at the map. I wanted to study literature or film and since the film studies usually required all A’s in high school I ended up applying for German and English literature in a few cities. It started out as a joke when I applied to the Technical University of Dresden to read literature, where they won awards for engineering and all things rocket science. It was the only school I got into. But I decided it was fate, packed a single suitcase I inherited from Grandpa and started on my Eastern German adventure. Father was long gone by the time I went to college, Grandma was immobile and Brother was vacationing in Florida, so when I finally left my hometown for good the only person standing next to me by the tracks was Mother. She cried. I held back tears. Then I stepped on the train from small rural Dusslingen to yet unknown Dresden. At the time it seemed like such a small moment. Most of the people on the train were just going to work, annoyed, or reading the paper. None of them, not even I at the time, realized the earth I grew up on was moving, not the train, when it pulled out of the old rotting village station with the „ß“ in „Dußlingen" still painted in Gothic print on the sandstone wall.

Two weeks earlier I had been to Dresden for the first time and auditioned for a couple of rooms in shared apartments. Again I was only accepted by one of them. I moved in with two girls I didn’t have any chemistry with during the 30 minutes we chatted and they rushed me through the flat, a special mode of communication which didn’t change much once I moved in with my suitcase. One was blonde and the other brunette, but contrary to certain 1940s film noir tropes they were both pretty cold. I think they hated me because I was - as proclaimed by them - a „hipster“, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and colored flannel shirts. I didn’t realize at the time I was being a hipster, and I couldn’t understand either why they thought it was cool to be opposed to hipsterdom. Which was in itself a form of being a hipster. But I digress. Examining the winding depths of the smelly hole that is the word „hipster“ would take a whole book, and the point of the story is that I had just moved to a different city in what merely 20 years ago had been an entirely different country and I was lonely as fuck. I tried to make friends with my fellow classmates but people studying German literature at a science school in Eastern Germany wore black, wrote Twilight fan fiction and cried every two hours because they didn’t want to live I assumed. I painted my new room apricot to cheer me up. It worked for about 25 minutes and then I seriously started questioning my color choice and general sanity. I tried to become friends with my roommates but then they told me that Kai, the guy whose room I had moved into, committed suicide two months earlier and I was using the deceased man’s furniture. My luck finding used worn down Ikea couches with whitish Italy-shaped stains that somebody had died on as well. I had to meet someone on gayRomeo immediately. Preferably someone alive, not fluent in Middle English and not judging me by the type of glasses I wore. 

„BoobyDoo“ was the gentleman I set my hopes on to pull me out of my recent-move-depression. His name was actually Robert but as a nod to the talking brown Great Dane we all love and cherish he renamed himself. He was 33 years old, 13 years my senior, had short brown hair and was about six foot tall when he stood on his hind legs, much like his namesake. BoobyDoo lived in Pirna, an average sized town half an hour east of Dresden. It was a Saturday afternoon in early November when I took the train from the city to meet him at the local station. Small towns in Saxony differed a lot from the ones I knew in „the West.“ Most of the buildings were fairly new, very square and painted in weird gleeful but muted colors like lemon buttermilk or - coincidence - apricot. Pastel yellow and orange were somehow supposed to bring back the sun after years of dark GDR rain clouds had burst over the land. I stood by the train station with the newly erected, printed sign that said „Pirna“ - no painted letters like where I was from. I waited for 20 minutes until I realized he had already been there when I arrived. I was just too shy or nervous to see him in his black Audi waiting by the side of the road a couple of yards away. He didn’t get out of the car. I walked over to him and knocked on the driver’s window. He motioned for me to get in the passenger seat. Introductions were made. I liked how he looked. He looked like a German G.I. Joe doll come to life, deprived of uniform and rank. His close-shaven hair and somehow generic appearance were part of his appeal. He was just a man doing his job as a state worker living in an average-sized town looking for a companion. In the story I usually spin when meeting someone he symbolized „normalcy.“ In the first few weeks of studying German and English literature required reading included fables of a fox cheating his way through a village of dumb and lesser than him animals and learning by heart the first few verses of the original Beowulf. My new roommates had just witnessed a suicide at close hand and the bathrooms in buildings were located in the stairwells, so more than anything I needed „normalcy.“ 

We didn’t speak much on the way driving to his house. He told me something about the history of Pirna, but honestly I didn’t really listen, I was too nervous. When we got to his half of a shared house I was impressed. They lived like Kings here in Pirna! Sure every third building had smashed-in windows and the plaster was peeling off here and there, but all in all you seemed to be able to live pretty comfortably on a small wage in this „Eastern Germany.“

We entered his house and he offered me a seat on the couch. He put a glass of tap water in my hand. Inside it was stained at the bottom which sometimes happens when the dishwasher doesn’t really work and the residue on the glass makes your tap water sparkle. I absolutely hate that. When that happens decency and humanity require you to put it back in the dishwasher once more. It wasn’t an easy conversation from then on. I asked him about his family who lived a couple of houses down the street. He’d lived in Pirna his whole life, only moving yards away from the house he grew up in. Back then I was even more judgmental than I am now, and there was a tone in my voice that told him I absolutely disliked living in the same place one was born and raised in. Now I was the bitch calling „Hipster!“ - just the other way round. I cried: „Anti-hipster!“ BoobyDoo was nice, a regular guy. He asked me what I wanted to watch and turned on the TV set. He changed the channel to Star Trek without waiting for an answer. I had never seen it, but was shocked by the various face applications they put on some of the actors. There was a lady with three giant folds of skin on top of her head. The poor woman had three foreheads! This type of 90s show hadn’t really aged well. Also: why not make them into completely different life forms? These characters didn’t look like alien life forms to me, they looked like humans on a very bad hair day. I liked the plot of the show though. As BoobyDoo explained to me while we were each sinking deeper into the cushions of his grey synthetic couch, this particular Star Trek series was about a crew on a spaceship stranded at the end of the galaxy, trying to find their way home through unknown galactic territory. I could definitely identify with that. And some days I did look in the mirror and felt like a Vidiian.

When the episode ended and the crew of the Voyager had successfully completed their mission this week but still weren’t home yet, we had both sunk so low into the couch that our heads touched. We looked at each other. He had one of these faces where everything had the same color, skin, nose, lips. Then he unzipped my pants. I pulled down his sweatpants. As the opening credits of the next Star Trek episode filled the screen we were giving each other handjobs. This was the first penis I had actually looked at in daylight and up close. It also had the same color as his nose and lips. I came on my stomach after two minutes. He didn’t. We watched another episode of Star Trek with our dicks out. Then he got up and asked me if I wanted to go to the bedroom. We didn’t speak after that.

He led me into a corner bedroom with four windows, two of which were open. Just a quick reminder: the time of the year is early November. He didn’t seemed to be bothered by the indescribable cold in the room. So I got on my knees, took off his pants and laid him down on the bed, all the while trying to hide my shivering limbs and keeping my hands steady. I tried and tried, but nothing worked. He couldn’t come. He became flaccid. I came one more time on his stomach. He wasn’t angry or annoyed or anything. He just lay there and stopped interacting with me. I looked at him wondering what I could do to make him feel, well, anything. He got up, pulled up his pants and stood there. Then he went out. I heard a door and after a while the flush of a toilet. He came back and stood in the doorway to the bedroom, looking out the open window and not at me. Not once. 

Apparently my fake interest in his all-time favorite TV show didn’t do for him. The half-assed attempts at getting him off weren’t doing it for him. I put on my shoes and jacket, and we got into the car. He drove me back to the train station, wordless. 

When I got out of the car and walked around to the driver’s window to wave goodbye he raised the car window. It was dark by then. But even through the reflections of the streetlights in the glass I could see his face. I could see in the blue-silver of his eyes the vast galactic territory I had no access to.

At that age, at that time, I didn’t see the bigger picture. I didn’t care for it. I was interested solely in the monster of the week. Who gave a fuck if I ever reached home again? Maybe at 33 he did. I had enough on my plate with the weekly challenge of surviving in a foreign place. What happened next week or even the week after that… who knew? All I cared to do was save my missing crew member and get the hell out of there. And I had managed to do so. Twice.

no.8 „lotion, lotion, lotion“

In the second month after moving into the shared flat in Dresden I woke up one Saturday morning to find a giant turd waiting for me in the toilet bowl. It was just sitting there, head tilted slightly upwards, staring at me. This wasn't the occasional stain or small miscellaneous drop of poop, I’m talking about a full dark-brown éclair-sized piece of shit. I know I didn’t put it there, and the two girls I lived with seemed too small in size to produce such a massive string of feces. But stranger things have happened, and it certainly hadn’t crawled back up the drain on its own. Also, there were no signs of toilet paper in or on the toilet - sometimes when you flush and it’s too big the pieces of toilet paper get tangled up or torn apart and swim around in the brownish water without direction. But none of that was evident, it was a clean, pure, untouched human turd, almost like the human it came from had sat down, pooped, and jumped right back off the seat without doing anything to him- or herself or the toilet. So now I had two choices. I could ring the alarm, wake up my roommates and call a household meeting to figure out this fecal mystery, or I could do none of the above and just flush it down where it belonged. Considering the already strained relationship with Stephanie, the blonde, and Peggy, the brunette, I decided to flush down my anger and uneasiness along with the turd itself and pulled the handle. Then I pulled it a second time because the first flush hadn’t been strong enough to carry the monster to its last resting place.

That night - unlike that morning’s turd - I couldn’t find any resting place in our apartment. Stephanie and Peggy had invited some friends over and were dancing in the kitchen to the Spice Girls, drinking cold punch made from cheap sparkling wine. There was a small window connecting my room to the kitchen, which was glued over with wallpaper but you could still hear every word they were saying in the other room. I roamed around my small cave, unable to concentrate and equally unwilling to join in their stupid fun. At one point I could hear them saying how weird I was and that I never took down the trash, which was true, but nonetheless hurtful to hear. Besides, I had swallowed my anger that morning in the turd situation, why couldn’t they do the same? Why did they have to voice it? To get out of the apartment and away from their judgmental comments I had to make plans for the night somehow. So of course I went online and found someone to date. He was what I came to call the Mickten-rotter. 

Mickten is the part of Dresden where the whorehouses are. It’s not quite central but not really far off either. Rotter I call him simply because he disgusted me. But I’m jumping ahead.

When my date for the night opened the front door to his apartment the first thing that struck me was that he looked just like my best friend from kindergarten. As he led me into his small but very clean flat I asked the universe what it was trying to tell me with that. I looked up to the ceiling and imagined the correspondent responsible for me in the universe-world; a stoned-out-of-his-mind teenager flipping his dirty underwear at me whenever I turned to him for guidance. I pulled myself back to the material world and noticed that Mickten-rotter was living in an exceptionally small place. He slept, worked, cooked and lived all in one room. The washing machine was fenced off from the couch by a thin pale yellow curtain and the couch folded out into a bed that slept two, as he happily told me while preparing the obligatory glass of tap water. He motioned for me to sit down and said his favorite TV show was on, did I mind watching for a bit? It turned out to be the 214th season of Deutschland sucht den Superstar, the German equivalent of the British original Pop Idol, which, in the hands of trusty producers from Cologne and too many years in, had become so bright and trashy it was unbearable to watch. (First three seasons were of course television at its finest.)

The hour-long humiliation of Germany’s youth and unfolding of the nation’s rather dire musical state gave me a chance to quietly examine my date. From time to time I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye while he sat mesmerized by the screen. I noticed he was still pretty young, but the extreme tan he got on his face and neck made him appear years older. His skin was deep dark orange, like the color you might encounter on a dirty buoy. 

I remembered the tanning trend well. Brother and Mother both had looked like that years ago. Their leather handbag faces deeply burned into my memory, I suddenly figured out how trends worked. It came upon me like lightning: Trends were set in suburban garages by the marvelous tightrope-walking people who were so genuinely weird and special they were too underground to be mainstream and too mainstream to be underground so that whatever they came up with was - no matter how distasteful - always original. These trends were quickly picked up by the shallow but hyper-successful distant friends of the tightropers living in garages and shown around the metropolitan areas and New York Cities of this world. A couple of years after that happened, small-town folk reading GQ or InStyle picked up on them and perfected the art of achieving a certain look in the cheapest way possible, since their middle-class jobs earned them shit but they still had enough pride to make it work. About five years after that the original trend that was set a decade ago arrived in the outer limits of Eastern German cities. Places so far off the map and economically so irrelevant that the semi-cycle of the idea ended there. The Eastern German Suburb is at the butt end of a very long one-way street. It’s where trends come to die.

And it’s where I had decided to spend my evening. When the program ended he turned to me, closed his eyes and with pursed lips moved his head closer to mine. At first I couldn’t figure out what was wrong about the kiss, it wasn’t exactly wet, it was slippery and tasted like vanilla mouthwash. I figured he must be a serious chapstick user. After I undressed him and put my arms around him on the couch I realized that wasn’t the only skin care product he was adamant about. His entire body from forehead to toe was covered in oily lotion. Seemed like his healthy buoy skin had to be maintained and pampered to stay orange and smooth as a newborn’s tush, just like one wanted it. To add to that he didn’t really do anything after making the first move. He sat there like a spineless sack waiting to be touched. I had a hard time holding on to any part of his body, and one time, as I tried to grab his shoulder, my hand slipped and hit myself in the face.

To be honest, I didn’t know why I kept going. I was nothing but disgusted. It wasn’t fair to myself and it certainly wasn’t fair to the poor man who for all I knew seemed to be having the slide of his life. But I kept going anyway. I didn’t pull away. I didn’t excuse myself. I didn’t leave. I went along with it. Which - needless to say - went pretty smoothly because of all the lotion.

On the way home I passed a bar called „The Thai Luck Oasis“ and the illuminated plastic palm tree in front of „Klax“ night club and rubbed my hands on my jeans where they left oily white stains. I looked down at them and got to thinking. I had done a lot of things that day I didn’t necessarily wanted to do, accepting and swallowing every unpleasantness just to make things work. Be it with my roommates, or with a warm body I didn’t find attractive. To smooth things out, I too was willing to take desperate measures. I pictured Future Yannik getting punched in the face and offering the puncher a fifty-dollar bill as an apology for standing in his way. That day riding home to my shared apartment I swore I wouldn’t live like that, and before flushing it down the next time a giant turd swam in my toilet bowl I would at least take a picture for evidence.

no.9 „college“

„wanna ravage my cunt coarse now hard!? looking for relax longtime fuck if ur hot I fuck you too.“

Reading that text I almost dropped my phone, and decided right then and there that I did not want Grindr sending me notifications any longer.

„What’s wrong?“ Antonia asked, looking around, embarrassed because I had apparently gasped loudly. I had met her that morning while we were both staring at a plan of the building the introduction course for first semester English Lit students was supposed to take place. We instantly bonded over the fact that we were completely lost and about 15 minutes late already, and both didn’t really care. I couldn’t believe I had found my best friend before classes had even started. And such a cool one at that! Antonia wore a used dark-green military coat that had holes in it, rocked Beats by Dr. Dre and had pink pastel tips in her brown hair, months before the movie Spring Breakers would even be released. We sat next to each other in the small lecture hall and were introduced to our professors and tutors for the upcoming semester. What I loved most about Antonia was that she rolled her eyes a lot. There was this kid who constantly raised his hand to ask if any of this would be part of the test.

„What test,“ Antonia would say. „She’s telling us where the restrooms are, how are you gonna test that information?“ 

„Whoever pisses in the halls, fails, I guess.“ I said. She laughed.

Banter! We were a great team already, and by the time we got to class schedules and she asked me if I loved Tina Fey as much as she did I knew I had found someone special.

Strutting our new fun tote bags with the university’s logo printed on them we strolled out the building and along campus. We visited the enormous newly-built central lecture hall, a concrete and glass square next to a 200-year old castle with a green copper dome observatory as its highest point. We admired the parallel layers of history and architecture only a European campus could offer, and felt very sophisticated because of the thought. I asked her why she moved to Dresden, an annoying question for anyone having recently moved to Dresden, as I knew from experience. Antonia was originally from Hanover and said she wanted to get away from her hometown, which I could identify with, and that she was „kinda over“ Berlin and the schools there hadn’t accepted her, which I could identify with even more. We parted ways when she had to cross the lawn to get to an Art History introduction class, while I was about to hit German linguistics hard, but we made a date for lunch at the cafeteria. I loved planning this, saying these things, „lunch at the cafeteria“, „English Lit“, „credit points“, „study breaks.“ Going to college was awesome! For a small-town boy like me it was all so new and exciting and academic. Who could say what hair color the next person I met would have? Not me! What a crazy life.

Desperate to start that crazy new college experience I crammed everything I could into that first day of classes. I registered for an entry level Japanese course. I went to a thing called Turbo Frisbee where about 42 dudes and six girls with shoulder pads and helmets would be locked up into a gymnasium and compete for one tiny frisbee in shockingly violent fashion. These frisbee people were very serious about their sport and when after 15 minutes one contender lost a tooth, nonchalantly got up, blood dripping from his mouth, kicked the tooth to the side of the field so no one would step on it and continued running after the frisbee, I left, with high regards for those brave mercenaries in velcro, but with even higher regards for my own dear life. The last extra-curricular activity I had planned for that night was an improv class functioning as a casting call for the student theatre group of the Technical University of Dresden, one of the oldest amateur theatre groups in the country.

I had done this before and it was a lot of fun throwing around these „Yes, and…“’s, especially when someone mentioned ISIS and I had to „Yes, and…“ and come up with information that turned out so ludicrous and uninformed I cannot mention it here. But the best thing about it were the people. They’re so much fun. Amateur theatre people are your favorite breed. There was quirky but very elegant Celine, who had light brown bangs and silk skin like a 1960s haute couture model. Steven and Sheba were pregnant together and also had a beaded braid each that reached the lower end of their backs. Isaac was a skinny thirtysomething with a goatee and a black Beatles haircut who gave me a high five after the two of us performed an improv slam dunk involving a simultaneous fart and burp. It’s hard to explain, you had to be there. But more importantly: Was he flirting with me? He seemed to be laughing extra hard at my jokes and smiling at me whenever we weren’t part of the scene. By the time he asked me if I had plans for the night I was madly in love, and had signed up to be a full-time member of the theatre group. 

Isaac invited me to a party of a friend of his in the heart of Neustadt, which is sort of the artsy/party/hipster neighborhood of Dresden. The university and the theatre class was basically at the other end of town. Since it wasn’t that cold that October we decided to walk. We got a Wegbier for the road and he started telling me about his studies in regenerative energies which he had begun in his late twenties and was doing a masters degree in. I liked his way of talking, soft but astute, with a firm conviction of liberal-environmental beliefs. He rolled and lit a cigarette while we were walking, took two drags and then offered it to me. I usually don’t smoke, but when a guy like Isaac offers me a cigarette like it’s a symbol for mutual understanding then I simply cannot refuse. So I inhaled deeply and coughed up smoke like a madman. He laughed, which made him even more likable.

Passing one of the tall dorm buildings around campus we realized our beer was already empty. Lots of these buildings have makeshift bars and clubs on the ground floor, so we decided to get some more beer at a place called the „Underwater Fish.“ The place was packed with nineteen-year-olds and one group of knowledge-wizened students in their mid-twenties,  the regulars, and the one giant speaker standing in the corner was blaring what you would call Techno Trance. All in all a pretty good turnout for a Tuesday night. Having spent the last seven years at the university Isaac met a friend or acquaintance wherever we went. He seemed to be known by all. And every time another old friend waved him over, he would take me with him and introduce me. I was getting major signals. I gained importance in his life. Was this one of these situations where you meet someone eerily handsome and are so urged on by soul starvation that you seem to form a meaningful bond over just a couple of hours of knowing each other? Or was I just on the verge of being blackout drunk?

What felt like thirty minutes tops turned out to be four hours we spent at „The Fish“, as the residents liked to call it. By then I couldn’t have walked a straight line if it hadn’t been for Isaac holding my arm and leading me across the bridge over the river. He said he wasn’t drunk at all, and when I kept caressing his jet-black hair he didn’t slap my hand or anything, he purred.

Finally we arrived at the sixties-themed orange-pink bar in Neustadt where the party was supposed to be. Only we got there about six hours late. The whole front of the bar was glass, so we could see there were but a handful of people left in there, with the lights already dimmed. The door was locked, but Isaac banged on the glass and to my surprise Celine from earlier unlocked it and let us in. It turned out she worked at that bar part-time and knew Isaac more intimately then previously presumed. There was only one other waitress behind the bar and two large Russians with shiny white kippahs and a video camera hovering over two Mimosas. Isaac approached them with arms outstretched and they greeted each other like long lost friends. I asked him if he knew those guys and he just said „No, why?“ The Russians handed us a shiny white kippah each and asked us to pose for the camera as guests for their brother’s bar mitzvah. They told us to have fun and appear as having the time of our lives. Isaac did some toasting for the camera but then quickly turned all his attention to quiet-but-confident Celine who stood by and giggled every once in a while. I had no idea who their brother was supposed to be or why he was allowed to be out this late, and I’m not sure anyone present was actually Jewish, but I took the free drinks anyway.

On my way to the bathroom I recognized Isaac’s bag he had thrown in the corner and noticed a small plastic leg sticking out. I couldn’t help myself and pulled out the leg. It was a 40cm BABY born doll with a straw hat on its head and a watering can in one hand. „Who are you?“ I confronted the doll, but it didn’t answer. When I looked Isaac in his watery brown eyes, by that time almost licking Celine’s bare shoulder, and asked him what the doll was about he told me matter-of-factly that he was married and had a daughter. I smiled and said something like „Congratulations!“, but quickly turned away to the coat hangers. Just then it hit me that I didn’t have a clue who these people were, and yet here I was, pretty much ready to get married and convert to fake Judaism if need be. I decided that this whole night was a complete failure, a jeu perdu, but that I wouldn’t walk away from it empty-handed. I grabbed my kippah and got out of there. Outside the door I stopped, looking back in through the glass façade, Isaac barely noticing I was gone, still partying with the two Russian bears and fun-in-an-elegant-way Celine in that annoyingly chic sixties interior. Taking out my phone and adjusting my kippah, that morning’s man with the cunt in want of ravaging suddenly didn’t seem so bad anymore. And after all, how coarse could it be?

no.10 „professional at work“

Today I woke up to a knock on my door, which has never happened before. I rolled around in bed and ignored the first knock, precisely because I had no idea what the sound was. By the second and third knock I realized I wasn’t in the most boring dream ever but somebody was actually knocking on the door to my room in our shared apartment. I rubbed my eyes and got up, opening the door to my blond roommate Stephanie. She was smiling apologetically and wearing white overalls spattered with paint.

„Did I wake you? Can you help me paint my room? I decided on ‚Petrol.‘“

She pointed to the green-blue stains on her overall. The color wasn’t half bad so I decided to help her. Stephanie was studying product design and specialized on packaging and interior decoration so she had come up with something fancy for her room. She had mapped out the walls with masking tape that criss-crossed and formed rectangles and triangles of varying sizes. She would paint over the masking tape and when she’d remove it later there were perfect white lines randomly shaping a unique pattern on the wall. For me personally it was a little too Pinterest, but I had just painted my room apricot, so who was I to talk? Also I jumped at the bonding experience. 

Stephanie and I were just about finished painting over the masking tape, when we heard a loud rattle from the kitchen. Then a loud clank and in the silence that followed a muffled „Fuck!“ Fuck indeed. The two of us had forgotten all about the human rescue cat we sheltered in our apartment and who left long strands of reddish brown hair all over the place: Our third roommate Peggy. Of course she didn’t need to be rescued at all; her mother and father were still together and were loving parents to Peggy, which made it even more annoying that she behaved like an orphan. 

When Stephanie and I entered the kitchen, Peggy had her hands in her hair and a panicked expression. The washing machine was emitting faint clouds of smoke. Peggy had wanted to get some washing done while preparing a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. In the heat of preparing she didn’t notice she had dropped both a fork and the pepper mill from the kitchen counter into the drum and started the machine. Just seconds after, it stopped working.

Stephanie patted Peggy’s shoulder and softly told her to calm down, that it wasn’t that bad, which is what every decent person would do. I on the other hand, after dipping my finger in the drum and licking the tip of it, told her it was missing salt, which is what a fun person would do. As expected, Peggy hated that. In hindsight I might have smirked a little too hard.

I couldn’t help it, the jokes just didn’t stop that day. When the mechanic came to our apartment and knelt over the broken washing machine I read the company’s name on the back of his work jacket: KüchenGeräte Bauer. Or short: KGB, which is a pretty funny name to call your house appliances company, even if it wasn’t based in Dresden. Unfortunately the man from KGB was everything but joking when he told us the new parts for the washing machine plus the service fees would amount to approximately 200€, which at that time was a lot of money to me and far more than Stephanie, Peggy or I could spend. We told the guy to order the part, that we’d come up with a solution and that we sure hoped he hadn’t installed a bug or a wire in our kitchen because we had the means to find out. He didn’t laugh.

A few days passed, and we still hadn’t come up with a solution for our financial crisis induced by the washing machine incident. None of us were making any extra money, and Stephanie had even quit her job, for reasons of „creative differences“ with the professor she worked for. According to her, he „wasn’t thinking progressively“ when it came to flaps. She explained it to me by saying that working for him was like Zaha Hadid designing sausage carts in Central Park, a reference that went - you guessed it - right over my head. 

On top of it all Peggy was acting like she had nothing to do with the whole thing. I wanted to discipline her by making her sell newspapers on the street and cutting her meals down to hot broth and stale pumpernickel, but Stephanie intervened and assured me that it was just a difficult phase Peggy was going through, that manifested itself in breaking things and being rebellious. I complained and asked her why it didn’t manifest itself in baking banana bread and being environmentally conscious, like with every other young person these days.

Regardless of the trouble with Peggy, there was still no cash coming in. I didn’t want to ask Mother for money, since she already made fun of me for not being able to live on my own, and Yannik putting cutlery in the washing machine sounded like something my family would come up with as a joke. I had to clear my head. So I went online and found a nice guy to meet up with.

Dirk Altmann was a short boyish man around thirty, with white-blond hair and a squirrel-like demeanor who right away invited me up to his hotel room, not far from where I lived. He said he was in town for business and offered me a small beer from the minibar. When I asked what he did for a living, I immediately regretted it. My question initiated a 40-minute rant about his job, which he apparently hated doing, but absolutely loved talking about.

Dirk was a salesman for heating elements and air vents, mostly to big tech firms, and he knew a lot more about them than just how to sell them. He knew how they were constructed, how they were installed, how they were maintained and cleaned, and he told me all about it, not just how heating elements were constructed, installed, maintained and cleaned, but also how air vents were constructed, installed, maintained and cleaned. He was convinced that you had to know the product inside out to be able to sell it. He told me that no one else in his field was as serious about heating elements as he was, and nobody had accumulated more knowledge on air vents than him. He even gave me his business card and, after taking in my thinly veiled bored expression, asked me, with a smirk much like the one I had when making the salt-joke earlier that day, if I felt any different about heating elements and air vents than before I had talked to him. I told him that I really didn’t. But I could tell he was a natural born salesman, because he talked me into doing something I had never done before and shouldn’t have done in the first place: I fucked him without a condom and came inside of him. Now, fucking a stranger without protection is a dumb thing to do. You don’t know this person, and he doesn’t know you. But Dirk Altmann convinced me to do it anyway. He was that good a salesman! But jokes aside, what I did was dangerous and stupid.

I’m sad to tell you that what happened next was even more dangerous, and a lot more stupid. During sex Dirk’s hyperactive energy somehow seemed to multiply, and a lot of things were happening at once and very fast and accompanied by even more talk. Imagine Sonic the Hedgehog in young Charlie Hunnam’s body with the speech pattern of the voice actors rattling off side effects at the end of drug commercials. But right after he came his whole body went limp and fell asleep like a baby. All the energy was gone in an instant.

To be fair, it was good sex, but I was still wide awake, and all the talk of installing air vents left me in want of adventure. I got up and put on my underpants, examining the hotel room for anything of interest. I peeked through the curtain to look down on the street. Kebap shops, students drinking beer, the usual. Then I turned around and there it was, resting on a stool on top of Dirk Altmann’s jeans. His wallet. Just out of curiosity, I looked inside. There were some business cards. And there were three 50€-bills. I smiled to no one. I wasn’t gonna do that. I put the wallet back and sat on the bed. Dirk started to snore. He looked like a stressed out baby, even when he was sleeping. 

I dressed. I breathed in deeply. Then I stood up, walked over to the wallet and opened it again. I had one of these old timey cartoon moments, where miniature versions of the people in your life spin around your head and repeat their most important lines in an echo to guide you to make the right decision. First appeared the KGB man repeating: „…200 Euros - Euros - ros…“, then a vision of Peggy pulling her own hair and fuming, after that Stephanie mumbling „Petrol - Petrol - etrol…“ and the last subconscious appearance was Zaha Hadid munching on a Hot Dog, which really wasn’t helpful at all. I waved off all these ghosts, slapped myself and made a decision. I took one of the bills out of the wallet, left the hotel room and closed the door on the sleeping Dirk Altmann, professional at work, wondering if the 50 Euros I had just stolen from a stranger would be enough to pay for my share of the new washing machine.

no.11 „captain redbeard’s odyssey“

The other day I was talking to a guy on Grindr who invited me to take a walk with him instead of asking how big my dick was. I have to say I do appreciate politeness, and talking a walk was a lovely idea on what was in reality something like the twelfth day of spring, but for the purpose and atmosphere of this story I will hereby call the first.

About 30 minutes later we met right in the middle of our apartments, at a tram station by the river Elbe which divides the city of Dresden in two halves, with the southern half being the part where the major malls and sights and the university and the dorms are located, and the northern half where the artsy neighborhoods and old abandoned industry buildings sit. 

His name was Sergei, he was a little shorter than me and had pale skin and rust-colored hair. Although he was younger than me, his hairline was already receding, but I kinda liked that about him. Paradoxically it made him look more inexperienced, like his hair wasn’t receding, but hadn’t yet started growing all the way. From the moment we hugged I could tell he was a kind person. We got some ice cream - me pistachio and him zabaione, which I have been lectured about many times but to this day will not accept as a flavor. We walked along the river as the sun came out. He told me about his struggles as a law student which were made even more strenuous by his actual desire of becoming a graphic novelist. He told me he had to do law so that his parents would be happy. He showed me some of his drawings on his phone and I thought they were quite good, although I was biased since they were mostly of semi-naked men. But not in primarily „sexy“ erotica poses; they were looking very cozy, snuggling up to a blanket or balancing a pillow on their asses while only wearing briefs and sometimes a thong. I would definitely pay money for that and told him as much. I’m still waiting for the graphic novel about five red-haired friends breaking into a pillow factory to, you know, not go down on each other but have the coziest night of their lives.

We sat down on a park bench overlooking the river and right away he asked if he could kiss me. This was moving a little fast but I was up for it and that way could maybe look into the flavor of zabaione some more. Soon we were full-on making out, undisturbed by the few passers-by along the Elbe, one of which was actually whistling at us. We stopped for a second, looked down on each other’s pants and each realized the respective erection the other one had going on. We smiled at each other. I asked him if he wanted to go to his place. He said we could try. I didn’t know what that meant, but decided to think nothing of it.

On the way to his place, crossing a bridge and passing the synagogue over to the „South Side“ we talked about why he had come to the city. He was originally from Northern Germany but moved to Dresden because he got accepted into law school here. Funny how almost everyone I had met so far was from another place and moved there because they got places to study or for financial reasons. To be honest I had absolutely no reason for moving there in the first place, but neither did I have any reason not to. And after a few short months the city was really growing on me. I had even become acquainted with one of the kiosk owners around the corner.

„Oh shit.“ Sergei stopped. We had walked all the way to his apartment in Striesen and now stood in front of the open gate that led to the inner courtyard of the building. There were two yellow balloons hanging under the long archway and laughter came out from the garden. „I totally forgot. My roommate’s sister is celebrating her birthday today.“

„In your apartment?“ I asked, confused.

„In the apartment, in the garden, on the stairway. Pretty much in the whole building. Oh no! And they’re so annoyingly generous and nice, when we walk in there they’ll offer us chairs and cake and, you know… maybe even cake pops!“ Sergei sighed loudly.

„Listen it’s, it’s like totally fine if we leave. We don’t have to go in. It’ll be weird to introduce me and everything.“ I smiled at him.

„You sure? I guess we’ve only just met.“ Sergei seemed elated. I wasn’t keen on meeting his friends anyway, I hardly knew him.

„Yeah let’s go. We’ll come up with something.“ I said.

„Alright,“ Sergei concluded as we walked back the way we came. „Although they are great bakers.“

„Can we go to your place?“ Sergei asked as we took a detour through the Großer Garten, the biggest urban park in town. I thought about the turd in the toilet bowl, the fork in the washing machine and the wafer-thin walls. „Roommates.“ I said and shrugged. „But I have an idea.“

The Hush Little Hostel in Dresden Neustadt was located in the backyard of a turn of the century building not far from where I lived. I had no idea how much hostel rooms in Germany cost and there was no sign out front advertising rates or such - everything was still analogue! Sergei was feeling a little weird about the whole notion of renting a room for a couple of hours to have sex in the middle of the afternoon. I told him not to be so Calvinist and promised him I would do the talking. When we walked in the owner sitting behind the counter was looking out from under his reading glasses and twisted his lips in a crooked smile. How can he already tell what we’re up to? Does this happen a lot?

„What can I do you for?“ The 40-year old owner with slicked back hair said. When I asked him how much a room for two hours would cost and he told me he only rented for the night and it would be 34 € for both, I took out my wallet and looked at it „Hey, do you-“ I started saying to Sergei, turning around to find him gone. „Not for everyone, sweetie.“ The owner winked at me. Backyard people.

Back outside I found Sergei leaning against a wall. „Maybe we should just call it a day.“ I looked at him and couldn’t help but kiss him. He grinned. I told him I would, but could not, call it a day. So I dragged him into the movie theater across the street, up the stairs to the restroom and into the toilet stall I locked shut. „Are you crazy?“ He said, his lips between mine. „Nope, this is happening.“ I replied, muffled by his tongue. He started to giggle as I unbuckled him and pulled down his pants, exposing a pair of briefs so white and comfortable that they surely must have been the inspiration for several of his drawings. This was happening. Finally. My sight blinded by a shirt half pulled up over my face I was all the more surprised when a low but clearly audible sound emerged from the room. A long, slouching, drawn-out fart rang out. It sounded wet as well. I sighed and looked sadly at Sergei. There was no denying it. A guy in the stall next to us was taking a seemingly long-overdue shit. That was happening, too.

„Alright, now I agree. Let’s call it a day.“ This time I was the one leaning against a wall outside, but with my head, not with my back.

Right when we got back to the tram station where we had met up about five hours earlier, Sergei narrowed his eyes and looked up at the sky. „Actually… it’s not really day anymore.“ I arched my head back. Was he thinking the same thing I was thinking? 

Minutes later the sun had set and the two of us were back on that same park bench we ate ice cream on. There was still the occasional passer-by, but by now the light was dying so quickly, only shapes and colors were distinguishable on the grassy patches along the Elbe. Shut out from the spaces we inhabited and each worked hard to avoid, we were forced to find a space in the city, outside, to temporarily occupy and use for what we were too afraid to admit to the people we lived with: suck each other’s dicks.

Unzipping Sergei’s pants and taking out his cock next to a couple of gardenias by the park bench, I just had to think about the irony of all of this. Look at us supposedly civilized people. We were young, lived in a big city, were oh-so advanced and progressive, we were students, we valued science and knowledge, and appreciated the arts, all the doors seemed to open up before us, but the one giant we couldn’t slay was our own feeling of shame; admitting to our innermost desires. But sure enough, and thank heavens, the river would always force us to.