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.