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.