When We Rise

by Cleve Jones

  And then it was noon and then he was there. I looked up and saw him striding towards me on the sidewalk with his henna-colored hair blowing behind him, sideways grin and nonchalant gait, and heard him calling out my name and laughing.

  CHAPTER 9

  On Barer Strasse

  SCOTT HELPED ME TO MY FEET, HUGGED ME, AND BUNDLED US BOTH onto a train to Munich, where he was still living in the house on Barer Strasse.

  I met Rico and Rosemary; he was wicked handsome, tall with thick wavy black hair, bushy eyebrows, big nose, and full lips; she was petite and mischievous and blonde and smart.

  I met Ted, who spoke only infrequently and was from some midwestern state, very shy and clearly new to hippie and homo ways. And I met Richard, a draft resister from New England, I think. His girlfriend was Mary; her family had money and she flew back and forth from the States to visit him.

  We shared a big house with thick walls that Rosemary, the only German in the house, claimed had been built in the 1500s. The exterior of the house was pockmarked by what Rosemary assured us was shrapnel and bullets from the war. When I asked which war, she raised an eyebrow. “All of them.”

  Soon the house was full, and some cute German and Austrian boys joined us, along with a buxom, round-faced, and apple-cheeked backpacker from Te Puke, New Zealand, named Sue Coxsmith. I liked Sue right off. At first she came across as shy, but as she shared her stories I could tell that she was a fearless adventurer. She was also a nurse, educated and very funny, with the most infectious giggle. She wasn’t particularly political but had strong feminist attitudes. I knew we were going to have some fun together.

  Scott was eager to hear news of San Francisco, and remembered Doug Norde from Tempe. He listened attentively when I described the Castro neighborhood.

  Scott grinned. “Who knows where we’ll grow old together?”

  I could see it.

  After a few hours of strong Bavarian beer and sticky Afghani hash, Sue, Mary, and I decided to hitchhike to Turkey. It didn’t seem very complicated from the maps; we’d head south to Italy, cross from Brindisi to Corfu and Athens, then take a bus to Thessaloniki, and a train to Istanbul. Scott was annoyed because he had the job at the Max Planck Institute and couldn’t come with us, but eventually he joined in the stoned and silly map-gazing. One week later we were on our way.

  We stood by the autobahn for hours but nobody wanted to pick up two girls and a boy. Eventually we paid for train tickets and enjoyed the views down the Rhine River Valley and into Italy. Rome was blistering hot, smelly, and overrun with tourists. We only stayed two days before heading on to Brindisi, a small dusty port town, sun-blasted brown and shimmering like the desert in a cowboy movie. The ferry to Corfu was great fun except for Mary’s seasickness, which kept her clinging to the rail, moaning and retching dramatically in the glaring sunlight.

  Sue muttered in her New Zealand twang, “We should have gone north, seen the glaciers instead.”

  I nodded, “Yeah, but we can’t afford Scandinavia.”

  Corfu was overflowing with noisy Brits and Australians, drinking even more than usual due to the horrible heat wave and pissing in the streets. We stayed in a nice youth hostel about a mile past a small Greek army base just north of the old town. Sue and Mary settled in and I went exploring by myself, intending to walk down the beach past the army base to town. Before leaving San Francisco I had copied from the Damron Guide the names and addresses of every gay bar in any city or town I thought I might visit, including two allegedly gay taverns in Corfu. But I couldn’t find them. So I ate souvlaki on the street and bought some cigarettes and a big bottle of red wine, and began the hike back along the beach to the youth hostel.

  As I approached the army base I saw a small fire at the water’s edge and heard music; about a half dozen Greek soldiers were drinking and dancing to traditional music playing from a boom box. They saw me and called out, and two of the soldiers walked towards me laughing and asking me questions in Greek. I just grinned and nodded and held up my bottle of wine. They held up theirs; we cheered and toasted each other. I offered my cigarettes; they offered me a place by the fire and a stick with some kind of burnt meat.

  I spoke not a word of their language and they spoke none of mine, but we drank and smoked and they taught me how to dance their dance. Around the fire, boom box booming, our arms over each other’s shoulders, we circled the fire, dipping slowly with the music and rising, dipping again and rising as we stepped forward and around and back again. Later we stripped and ran shouting into the dark sea, cooling our bodies from the hot humid night air. We swam naked in the cool black water, occasionally bumping and sliding up against each other, shouting and splashing in the gentle waves.

  One of the soldiers kept close to me. He was the tallest of the group and the quietest, and I noticed that every time I came up for air, he was watching with his dark eyes under thick eyebrows. I’d seen his strong arms and broad shoulders and narrow waist on the beach. His shoulders, back, and torso were light tan and completely smooth except for a small patch of hair in the exact center of his chest. His face was clean-shaven but I could almost see his beard growing as the hours swam by, casting a shadow across his jaw and the muscles of his neck.

  After a while I began to tire and walked back to the fire. I threw some more wood on the fire, and as I pulled on my pants and T-shirt the tall soldier came up behind me, indicating with gestures that he would walk with me the remaining kilometers up the beach to the hostel.

  We walked without speaking, then lay for hours in the sand dunes on a blanket made of our clothes, kissing and rolling about as the waves lapped gently at the shore and the warm breeze played across our bodies. As the pink light of dawn appeared over Albania and the Greek mainland, he held me close against his chest, breathing into my hair, speaking words I did not know but understood.

  The following day Sue, Mary, and I took the ferry to Piraeus and the funny little wooden train into Athens. Sue and Mary dragged me around in the heat, visiting the Parthenon and the Greek Museum and other historic places for a couple days before we got on a bus that blared Greek pop music nonstop at deafening volume all the way north and east to Thessaloniki, a big grey furnace of a city.

  In Thessaloniki we boarded a train for Istanbul that was delayed repeatedly from the moment we took our seats. There were numerous staticky, rasping announcements from the train’s public address system, but the Greek and Turkish passengers alike seemed to have as much trouble as we did in deciphering the messages. Something was up, though. We could tell that much from the numbers of tanks and armored personnel carriers on either side of the railway tracks as we approached the border.

  Just one year earlier, after the Greek junta toppled the government of the island nation of Cyprus in order to annex it, the Turkish army had invaded Cyprus and seized over a third of the island while evicting almost two hundred thousand Greek Cypriots before international pressure brought an end to the war. But every few months, one crisis or another would bring the two sides to the brink again for a round of saber rattling and nationalist boasts. As we approached the border we could see the Turkish tanks on one side and the Greeks on the other.

  Turkish soldiers and customs officials boarded our train and demanded identity papers from every passenger. We, with our olive-green American passports, were treated with mocking disrespect and condescension, but the Greeks in our compartment were slapped around and loudly bullied as their baggage was rudely searched. Mary started to cry and Sue looked grim but she and I understood that this was just a bit of drama to be played out, and sure enough, after a few hours of everyone sweating in the suffocating heat, the soldiers and officials stepped off and the train began to move slowly, then faster, towards Istanbul. We pulled the windows open and began to relax as the cooling air rushed into our compartment.

  Mary started to whine about wanting to go home. Sue rolled her eyes, then caught me checking out a Turkish boy in the corridor and laughed. The train slowed again a
nd we pulled in to Sirkeci Terminal.

  Istanbul was unlike any city I had seen before. It was beautiful and nobody ever seemed to sleep; the streets were always packed. The Bosporus was narrower than I had imagined and crowded with such a large number of vessels that I couldn’t imagine how they navigated without colliding. In San Francisco one can see an occasional ship gliding slowly beneath the Golden Gate, but here the ships, boats, and barges—both civilian and military—raced past us constantly as they transported goods and people from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and then to the Aegean, some carrying the hammer and sickle flag of the Soviet Union.

  I wandered through the Grand Bazaar and visited Hagia Sophia, the Topkapi Palace, and Sultan Ahmed Mosque. I spent hours in Sultan Ahmed—the Blue Mosque—overwhelmed by the intricacy of the tile work and the soaring stone walls.

  The Turkish men confused me. Many of them were very handsome, with the flashing dark eyes, swarthy jaws, and full lips that I love. Men walked everywhere hand in hand, something I had never seen before. They made eye contact on the street and when they spoke they stood close. On the packed bus back to the youth hostel, first one, then another pressed up against me, groping for my butt or grinding into me with the motion of the bus.

  Back at the youth hostel, we compared notes and bruises. Sue had fared the worst and ruefully displayed the black-and-blue pinch marks on her breasts and buttocks. I showed my own bruised bottom and described the scene on the bus.

  “These people are pigs,” Mary wailed. “They’d fuck a tree if they could find a hole.” Sue and I laughed at that but were growing weary of her constant complaints.

  As a history buff, I wanted to visit all the sites, including places from antiquity, like Troy, and Gallipoli, where the Turks defeated the Allies in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire.

  We headed south on local buses, hugging the coast. Sue and I were both on a very tight budget; each of us had about a thousand dollars to last us the entire summer. Mary, however, had unlimited funds, needing only to wire home for help from her parents. She complained about everything, and now declared that she was ill and would need to rest for several days in a hotel room with air conditioning. We ditched Mary at Çanakkale, in a nice hotel near the airport. She was furious and cried, but Sue and I couldn’t afford to hang out and look after her. Air conditioning was not in our budget.

  Eventually we crossed back over to Greece on a ferryboat from Izmir to Mitilini, also known as Lesbos, legendary birthplace of the poet Sappho. The ferries running between the Greek islands were cheap and it was possible to sleep on the beaches with little risk, so we bummed around the islands for a week or two, making our way south to Crete, which I had dreamed of visiting since childhood. We walked and hitchhiked all over the island. My clearest memory is of standing by the side of the hot road with Sue, with no cars in sight for hours, singing “Me and Bobby McGee.” Then, desperate for shade, we found an ancient cave overlooking the sea with a freshwater spring inside. We washed our faces and feet, drank some wine, and imagined who else had sheltered there over the millennia.

  We explored Knossos, where the Minotaur devoured the seven Athenian boys and seven maidens that were brought to him as tribute each year until he was slain by Theseus, then took a bus to the southern coast and the town of Matala. I wanted to see the caves there, having heard of them in a song by Joni Mitchell, but the hippies were long gone, driven away by the military and the church, and the Neolithic caves were now filled with shit and garbage and broken bottles.

  We headed back to Athens and were hanging out in Syntagma Square when Sue came back with iced coffees and a big grin on her round face.

  “You’re not going to believe the deal they have on flights to Cairo!” We checked our wallets and found little but decided to go anyway. We landed in Cairo the following day.

  I have only three photographs of our weeks in Egypt. One shows me alone, in brown corduroy pants and a blue cotton shirt, standing under a palm tree by the Nile River. I look at the image today and cannot re-create the moment or how I was feeling or what I was thinking. My expression is unfathomable to me, but I think this boy is happy and confident and that the smile is a bit of a smirk. I think that this boy thought he could do anything. The second shows Sue and me with the staff of a small hotel where we stayed in Luxor. The third shows Sue and me and, between us, a smiling Mustapha, who quite clearly has his hand on my butt.

  We met Mustapha in the train station of Luxor, ancient city of Thebes and home of the sun god Amun-Ra. Mustapha was hustling business for his uncle’s little hotel and promised to show us the sights. He was shorter than me, dark brown, with a ready grin and a tight muscular body. He came for me that night with a jeep and he drove me out into the desert for sex. I was beginning to understand that the Western concept of homosexuality simply did not apply here, as was the case in Turkey and, to some extent, Greece.

  “You know, Mary was right,” Sue snorted, “these guys would fuck a tree.”

  Mustapha was sweet, though; he brought us little gifts of fruit and showed us the astonishing ruins of Luxor Temple and Karnak. And one night he defended us when several local men attempted to break into our room. Sue and I were dragging furniture to barricade the door when Mustapha came to the rescue and drove them away.

  We got as far south as Aswan, where the High Dam’s construction had been completed five years earlier. The enormous reservoir that it created was almost filled; and while some of the most significant tombs and temples had been carefully carved apart and removed, there were many that were left to be hidden forever by the rising waters of Lake Nasser. We hired a boy to take us out on the lake in his little boat.

  The water was perfectly still and we glided across it silently but for the sound of his oars. Sue pointed ahead and whispered, “What’s that?” just as we slid past what must have been the very tip-top of an enormous monument now drowned beneath tons of water. It was an eerie moment and reminded me of a Ray Bradbury story about the canals of Mars.

  I wanted to press on, travel farther south to the Sudan, but we had so little money and Sue would need to report soon for her new position as a nurse in London. We took buses back to Cairo and then used our return tickets to Athens.

  Back in Athens, we planned our next moves. A trained and registered nurse, Sue was able to find work anywhere in the world. My future was less clear. But before we left Greece we paid a few more drachmas and took the ferry to the tiny island of Kea.

  We stopped in the town for wine, water, olive oil, and some onions and tomatoes, then hiked the mile or two out to a deserted beach.

  “Shouldn’t we get some food?” Sue asked. “Don’t we need more than tomatoes and onions?” I assured her that fresh fish awaited us, and pulled out the little box of fishing gear I had in my backpack.

  I fished while Sue paddled around in the warm water. Soon we had a tasty feast of little fried fish in a sauce of red wine, wild herbs, and tomatoes and onions. We spent a few days there, reading and fishing and diving from a big rock into the sea and then floating, buoyant in the salty Mediterranean.

  As we packed up to leave I scraped out a small hole in the ground and placed my fishing tackle, a knife, and a small frying pan in it and covered it with a big flat rock. Sue looked at me quizzically.

  “I like it here. I may come back.”

  We spent one last night in Athens to sleep and shower, then went to the bus station and began a long series of bus rides north, followed by hitchhiking nonstop through what was then called Yugoslavia, a communist state controlled by the dictator Marshal Josip Broz Tito since 1943. We didn’t stop because it felt dangerous there and different in a way we did not think we could navigate.

  I remember only a sense of anxiety and one night, in a large roadside campground outside of Belgrade, how the various ethnicities separated themselves from each other in distinct areas for Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, Macedonians, Kosovans, and Gypsies. The tension between the groups was palpable and we abando
ned any idea of heading west to the beautiful Dalmatian Coast beaches, choosing instead to move on as quickly as possible to the Austrian border and then Germany.

  A few days later, back in Munich, we stood beneath Scott’s window and whistled “Un Bel Dì” until he threw open the window and yelled out, “Where the hell have you two been and what on earth did you do with poor Mary?” We stayed up all night, drinking Hefeweizen and smoking the hashish Klaus, one of Rosemary’s friends, had smuggled from Afghanistan in his deluxe VW van, as we shared the stories of our great adventures.

  I knew I had to get a job; the money I had saved in San Francisco was gone and there was no way I was going to be a burden to Scott. Rosemary took me down to the police station to register as a resident alien and apply for an Aufenthaltserlaubnis, a typically long German word meaning work permit. The permit was issued swiftly after Rosemary confirmed for the bored but still officious bureaucrat across the desk that yes, this crazy American hippie is willing to wash dishes for very little money in the basement of a luxury hotel with all the other unwashed foreigners we employ to do the work that proud German people will not, even though he is white. Or something like that. Anyway, I got the work permit and a job as a dishwasher at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, in the heart of Munich’s old city.

  I would gain two important life lessons while living in Munich and working in the basement of the Hotel Bayerischer Hof.

  First, I experienced life as an immigrant, an outsider. Whatever undeserved privilege may have resulted from my white skin, to the Germans, without exception, I was still an Ausländer.

  At work, traveling to work on the tram, in the markets, while dealing with authorities, I was always an Ausländer before I was anything else, a foreigner who was visibly different and couldn’t speak the language. I was also a queer, a Schwuel.