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.