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.