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Istanbul, July 16
The next day I packed my bags and bade farewell to the Chillout Galata, then spent a few hours sitting in the sun in front of the Shake'In and reading before making my way down to the departure point for the bus company, near Taksim Square. The guy at the hotel had examined my ticket and explained to me that this was just going to be a shuttle bus to take me to the actual bus station, not the bus to Alanya itself. And I would have to wait an hour at the bus station before the actual bus departed. "It's not a nice place to hang out," the guy from the hotel had warned me. I shrugged-- I had seen some pretty bad bus stations in my life. "Do they at least have beer there?" I had asked him. "I wouldn't count on it," he replied.
So I picked up two half-liter cans of beer from a convenience store off Taksim, then tried to take a short-cut to the pickup point which nearly made me miss the shuttle. But I caught it.
And when the shuttle bus got to the bus station, I realized that I hadn't even correctly imagined what a not-nice place it could be. It wasn't that it was some dilapidated, hulking, crumbling structure in the inner city with winos and junkies hanging around it. No, much worse. It was a tiny building with a parking lot just off the freeway in the outskirts of European Istanbul. I had thought that there would at least be some kind of restaurant or döner joint or something there where I could fill my stomach, but no. All there was was a tiny convenience store staffed by a middle-aged lady squinting at a blaring TV with a selection of only chips, pretzel sticks, cookies and soft drinks. Even if there had been a supermarket somewhere in the neighborhood, there was simply no pedestrian access out of this place. I bought a bag of pretzel sticks and ate half of it, rationing the rest for the trip, and grabbed one of the plastic folding chairs under the umbrella of the 'terrace' of the station to smoke a cigarette and read.
It wasn't long before the bus arrived, truly a gargantuan thing much taller than a Greyhound. I checked my backpack into the luggage compartment and went to my assigned seat. It really was like an airplane, just like K. had said-- the seat was a form-fitting pleather armchair and the interior of the bus was plush and hush (not quite as deluxe as the page linked to here would have it, there were no seatback screens and no bistro on my bus). The bus rumbled to life and hit the freeway as the sun was setting. Ten minutes later, we were crossing the suspension bridge across the Bosphorus-- my pulse quickened and I grabbed my camera. Unfortunately, I was sitting on the left side and I couldn't get a good shot of the "Welcome to Asia" sign. Asia! At long last!
The bus pulled in less than 10 minutes later at the bus station for Asian Istanbul, quite a bit bigger than the European bus station but every bit as isolated in freewayland. I went to stretch my legs, smoke and use the facilities for the 20 minutes or so that we were there, keeping tabs on my fellow passengers so that I would know when it was time to go back to the bus, since I didn't understand anything of the announcements made. I got back on the bus, and this time the seat next to me was occupied, by a not too shabby looking guy listening to his iPod. For all the comfort with which the bus had been designed, they really didn't leave much room between the seats, and a certain amount of leg contact with my neighbor was inevitable. But I could only figure that this is where the lack of prohibition on same-sex contact would come in handy for me, and after the steward came down the aisle with a cart of beverages (just like a plane!) and I had my orange juice, I put on my sleeping mask and earplugs and pulled my blanket around me to go to sleep for as much as the remaining 14 hours of traversing Anatolia as I could-- I decided that the guy next to me was my temporary boyfriend and went to sleep, maybe with some inappropriate thoughts about our bodily contact. Two hours later, around 10pm, the bus stopped and the lights came up again-- the steward announced something and everybody got up to get off the bus. I groggily followed everyone to this way station, a rest stop in the middle of nowhere owned by the bus company, and got myself a meal of köfte and rice at the cafeteria. Surmising that this rest stop would last at least half an hour, I went back to the bus to grab a can of beer and then drank it somewhat surreptitiously on the terrace of the rest stop, since they didn't sell alcohol there and I wasn't sure if this was appropriate. But no one batted an eye. Soon it was time to go again and I settled back in next to my boy and got a pretty good night's sleep for the rest of the way.
When I awoke, we were on the outskirts of Antalya. We stopped at the glass-and-steel bus station there and I nearly missed the departure after going to pee and get a cup of coffee. The bus trundled down the coastal road to Alanya for two hours, occasionally stopping to let someone off at some resort high-rise or other. At last we arrived at the last stop-- Alanya-- around 11am, and sure enough, K. was there waiting for me with a car and driver. Good to see a familiar face!
K. took me first to her apartment so that I could drop off my stuff; then we caught a bus to a stop halfway up the mountain crowned with the more than 800-year-old citadel that Alanya is famous for. This was the location of the study center owned by my alma mater in America, which K. is the director of. This summer, a Department of State-funded program was going on there for about 15 American graduate and undergraduate students-- a program in intensive Turkish. K. and I ate lunch with the students, then hiked up the mountain to see the citadel and take in the breathtaking view of the fortress wall that snaked all the way up from the bottom. All the while accompanied by K.'s legendary encyclopedic knowledge about the history of the Ottoman Empire-- no better way to see it!
After we hiked back down the mountain into town, K. took me swimming at a pristine beach behind the Alladin hotel (patiently explaining to me from her knowledge of Arabic etymology that no, that was not a misspelling: in fact, the usual Western rendering with one L and two D's is less faithful to the Arabic original), then, when I was already completely exhausted (having not slept all that well on the bus), she took me out to a fancy restaurant for mezze, charcoal-grilled kebab and lots of raki. No need for me to grab at the check at the end-- this was all part of my speaker's fee! Finally, she took me to the tourist district so that I could get a chance to see Alanya's only "gay" bar, a shocking pink neon colored establishment run by two middle-aged X-ish queens. This bar was tucked away in an alley, in the shadow of the barn-like disco monstrosities dominating the tourist district, with drunken Northern European youth staggering in and out. The bar was virtually deserted, but we sat out front drinking our beers and watching the nightlife walk past. I picked up a magazine for X-ish expats in Alanya.
Then on our way home, K. looped us down along the beach side of the tourist district, with tacky faux-Roman columns dominating the entrances to the disco barns.
"Check this out," she whispered to me as she discreetly pointed toward a platform next to a column. Three European tourist girls were dancing and gyrating on the platform. Then K. indicatively cast her gaze a bit closer to us and off to the side, where a gaggle of teenaged Turkish boys stared, agape. The chin of one of them had even dropped onto the shoulder of his friend, quite literally.
The next day I was due to speak to K's students about my work, but not until 4pm. I woke up and went down to the shopping street parallel to K's house to have a leisurely breakfast of börek and coffee. Then I went to an internet café to get my fix, and most importantly, research what my next move would be. K. had told me that there was a twice-weekly ferry from Alanya to Girne in the "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus". From there I could take a shared taxi to the Turkish half of Nicosia. Would there be any problem crossing the Green Line into Cyprus proper? "No, definitely not for you, since you're European," K. had said. I decided to check this out on the internet. As reliable a source as that is-- there were varying statements about this on different travel forums. Some insisted that you could cross the Green Line, but not with luggage. But most seemed to indicate that you could cross, as long as you had a visa for Cyprus or didn't need one. Apparently Cyprus had been difficult about it for a while after the border opened in 2004, but then it got reprimanded by the European Union that it had to at least let EU citizens in under any circumstances. So it made sense to me that I wouldn't have any problems.
Plus I found a travel agency in (the southern half of) Nicosia that offered passage by sea to Egypt and Israel. Really?? I fired off an email to find out if that was true, or if that service had been suspended. In any case, there was only one way forward, and that was to Cyprus-- if I couldn't manage to get off Cyprus by sea, then I would just have to fly or figure something else out. I went to the travel agency in Alanya that sold tickets for the ferry to Girne and bought one for the next day.
My talk went quite swimmingly that afternoon, although as I had to say to K., "I like talking about my work more than I like actually doing it," a problem which I am still struggling with as I write this.
That night, my last night in Alanya, I went out on my own after K. went to bed-- I wanted to hang out at the weird "gay" bar again. K. lives on a sort of precipice right above the tourist district-- as soon as you walk out her door at night, you hear the cacophony of the discos from below. Now I am not a religious man (as you should know by now) but I do believe in Hell: and I believe that wherever it exists, it is inevitably a human creation, the "Moloch!" of Metropolis, for example.
There is something about the way 10 different sound systems blasting house music interfere with each other that I cannot describe as anything less than Satanic-- it really did sound like inhuman screams of suffering to me coming from the discos. I gulped and headed downhill into the Darkness, keeping a grip on my pure, innocent heart (which loves nothing more than the sacred sound of the guitar string and the real drum) to just get to the bar and drink a couple of beers.
It started out uneventfully-- the bar was just as dead as ever in the midst of all the chaos, the old X-ish queens sat at another table outside, and the twinky (but almost certainly straight) waiter brought me a beer. It wasn't long, though, before two boys stumbled down the alley and sat at my table. The one sitting close to me asked me if I would buy him a drink. I shook my head and tried my best to ignore him, continuing to sip my beer and smoke my cigarette.
"Ohhhh, I've had such a hard day..." he said, and through a combination of elliptical English and body language made clear that he had just been kicked out of one of the discos. No wonder, he seemed pretty drunk or fucked up on something. "How old you?"
"32," I answered.
"I'm 19," he said. Whatever he had been through, he looked pretty aged for 19. "And my friend is 17," he said, motioning to his friend. That was a bit more believable. He grabbed my beer and took a swallow. Before I could say "hey", he went on: "Are you gay?"
"Yes."
"So are you top or bottom?"
I laughed. "Both."
He didn't seem to understand this. "Top or bottom?"
"Both, sometimes I'm top and sometimes I'm bottom."
He pointed a thumb at his chest. "I'm top." Aren't they all, I thought. "I really wanna f-f-fuck you," he went on.
I shrugged. He grabbed my hand and placed it on his crotch. "My friend likes you," he said, going off on another tack. His friend nodded and while I couldn't see what his friend's hand was doing under the table, his elbow revealed that he was pumping away madly, trying to work up something for me to feel. The first boy took another swallow of my beer. I was starting to get irritated, but I kept a bemused smile on my face.
"I love you," the first boy said. At this he pulled down his cap at an angle and dipped his chin, looking at me expectantly with one eye in a rakish pose that he had learned somewhere. I was unimpressed. "Will you just give me a kiss? One little kiss?" He made a kissy-face at me. I leaned in to give him one little peck on the lips.
At this point the waiter swooped in and hissed something in Turkish at the boys. Was he telling them to leave me alone? No, it was clear from the context that it was more like, "No same-sex public display of affection in front of the bar, we could get shut down." As if the rest of the utterly filthy display wouldn't raise any eyebrows.
I was getting pretty tired of this, though. I recalled the time years ago that I took T. to a gay disco in Xxxxx where straight people aren't allowed-- I had told him to do his best not to blow his cover, and he did. When some nasty old guy took a shine to him and wouldn't take no for an answer from him, he just kept protesting "No, I can't. You see, I'm already seeing someone back in San Francisco." Which was true-- his girlfriend/fiancée. But he really did have to put up with a lot of hassle from that guy, I guess because his tactic might have implied that he would be only too glad to go home with that guy if he weren't already taken. Partly with that in mind, I decided to try a different tactic than showing only faint interest. "You know what?" I said, pulling my hand out from under the first boy's hand, which was pressing my hand against his crotch, "I don't think I feel like being a bottom tonight." I slid my hand in the direction of his ass, and he squirmed in his seat. "I look at you and that nice ass of yours and I think, I really feel like more of a top now."
He wriggled away and shook his head.
"Aw, c'mon. I bet it would be really nice to take you."
He looked a bit scared and tried to grab my hand and put it against his crotch again. I pulled my hand away.
"No, I'm not in the mood. C'mon." I started massaging my own crotch demonstratively. I winked at him exaggeratedly and chk-chk'ed.
He slid his chair back slowly, trying to keep his cool and keep looking at me with a macho suaveness. "I work at Yyyyy Café down the street... do you promise to come visit me there tomorrow? You can get breakfast."
"Sure, I will visit you."
"OK." The boy tossed his head coolly at his friend, and his friend got up too. "See you tomorrow. Maybe you change your mind."
"Nope, I doubt it-- there's only one thing I'm after now." And I made a show of craning my neck to check him out a bit from behind.
The boys finally swaggered/staggered off to find another mark. I leaned back in my chair, relieved. One more beer, then back to K's place for my last night in Turkey!
The next day I packed my bags and bade farewell to the Chillout Galata, then spent a few hours sitting in the sun in front of the Shake'In and reading before making my way down to the departure point for the bus company, near Taksim Square. The guy at the hotel had examined my ticket and explained to me that this was just going to be a shuttle bus to take me to the actual bus station, not the bus to Alanya itself. And I would have to wait an hour at the bus station before the actual bus departed. "It's not a nice place to hang out," the guy from the hotel had warned me. I shrugged-- I had seen some pretty bad bus stations in my life. "Do they at least have beer there?" I had asked him. "I wouldn't count on it," he replied.
So I picked up two half-liter cans of beer from a convenience store off Taksim, then tried to take a short-cut to the pickup point which nearly made me miss the shuttle. But I caught it.
And when the shuttle bus got to the bus station, I realized that I hadn't even correctly imagined what a not-nice place it could be. It wasn't that it was some dilapidated, hulking, crumbling structure in the inner city with winos and junkies hanging around it. No, much worse. It was a tiny building with a parking lot just off the freeway in the outskirts of European Istanbul. I had thought that there would at least be some kind of restaurant or döner joint or something there where I could fill my stomach, but no. All there was was a tiny convenience store staffed by a middle-aged lady squinting at a blaring TV with a selection of only chips, pretzel sticks, cookies and soft drinks. Even if there had been a supermarket somewhere in the neighborhood, there was simply no pedestrian access out of this place. I bought a bag of pretzel sticks and ate half of it, rationing the rest for the trip, and grabbed one of the plastic folding chairs under the umbrella of the 'terrace' of the station to smoke a cigarette and read.
It wasn't long before the bus arrived, truly a gargantuan thing much taller than a Greyhound. I checked my backpack into the luggage compartment and went to my assigned seat. It really was like an airplane, just like K. had said-- the seat was a form-fitting pleather armchair and the interior of the bus was plush and hush (not quite as deluxe as the page linked to here would have it, there were no seatback screens and no bistro on my bus). The bus rumbled to life and hit the freeway as the sun was setting. Ten minutes later, we were crossing the suspension bridge across the Bosphorus-- my pulse quickened and I grabbed my camera. Unfortunately, I was sitting on the left side and I couldn't get a good shot of the "Welcome to Asia" sign. Asia! At long last!
The bus pulled in less than 10 minutes later at the bus station for Asian Istanbul, quite a bit bigger than the European bus station but every bit as isolated in freewayland. I went to stretch my legs, smoke and use the facilities for the 20 minutes or so that we were there, keeping tabs on my fellow passengers so that I would know when it was time to go back to the bus, since I didn't understand anything of the announcements made. I got back on the bus, and this time the seat next to me was occupied, by a not too shabby looking guy listening to his iPod. For all the comfort with which the bus had been designed, they really didn't leave much room between the seats, and a certain amount of leg contact with my neighbor was inevitable. But I could only figure that this is where the lack of prohibition on same-sex contact would come in handy for me, and after the steward came down the aisle with a cart of beverages (just like a plane!) and I had my orange juice, I put on my sleeping mask and earplugs and pulled my blanket around me to go to sleep for as much as the remaining 14 hours of traversing Anatolia as I could-- I decided that the guy next to me was my temporary boyfriend and went to sleep, maybe with some inappropriate thoughts about our bodily contact. Two hours later, around 10pm, the bus stopped and the lights came up again-- the steward announced something and everybody got up to get off the bus. I groggily followed everyone to this way station, a rest stop in the middle of nowhere owned by the bus company, and got myself a meal of köfte and rice at the cafeteria. Surmising that this rest stop would last at least half an hour, I went back to the bus to grab a can of beer and then drank it somewhat surreptitiously on the terrace of the rest stop, since they didn't sell alcohol there and I wasn't sure if this was appropriate. But no one batted an eye. Soon it was time to go again and I settled back in next to my boy and got a pretty good night's sleep for the rest of the way.
When I awoke, we were on the outskirts of Antalya. We stopped at the glass-and-steel bus station there and I nearly missed the departure after going to pee and get a cup of coffee. The bus trundled down the coastal road to Alanya for two hours, occasionally stopping to let someone off at some resort high-rise or other. At last we arrived at the last stop-- Alanya-- around 11am, and sure enough, K. was there waiting for me with a car and driver. Good to see a familiar face!
K. took me first to her apartment so that I could drop off my stuff; then we caught a bus to a stop halfway up the mountain crowned with the more than 800-year-old citadel that Alanya is famous for. This was the location of the study center owned by my alma mater in America, which K. is the director of. This summer, a Department of State-funded program was going on there for about 15 American graduate and undergraduate students-- a program in intensive Turkish. K. and I ate lunch with the students, then hiked up the mountain to see the citadel and take in the breathtaking view of the fortress wall that snaked all the way up from the bottom. All the while accompanied by K.'s legendary encyclopedic knowledge about the history of the Ottoman Empire-- no better way to see it!
After we hiked back down the mountain into town, K. took me swimming at a pristine beach behind the Alladin hotel (patiently explaining to me from her knowledge of Arabic etymology that no, that was not a misspelling: in fact, the usual Western rendering with one L and two D's is less faithful to the Arabic original), then, when I was already completely exhausted (having not slept all that well on the bus), she took me out to a fancy restaurant for mezze, charcoal-grilled kebab and lots of raki. No need for me to grab at the check at the end-- this was all part of my speaker's fee! Finally, she took me to the tourist district so that I could get a chance to see Alanya's only "gay" bar, a shocking pink neon colored establishment run by two middle-aged X-ish queens. This bar was tucked away in an alley, in the shadow of the barn-like disco monstrosities dominating the tourist district, with drunken Northern European youth staggering in and out. The bar was virtually deserted, but we sat out front drinking our beers and watching the nightlife walk past. I picked up a magazine for X-ish expats in Alanya.
Then on our way home, K. looped us down along the beach side of the tourist district, with tacky faux-Roman columns dominating the entrances to the disco barns.
"Check this out," she whispered to me as she discreetly pointed toward a platform next to a column. Three European tourist girls were dancing and gyrating on the platform. Then K. indicatively cast her gaze a bit closer to us and off to the side, where a gaggle of teenaged Turkish boys stared, agape. The chin of one of them had even dropped onto the shoulder of his friend, quite literally.
The next day I was due to speak to K's students about my work, but not until 4pm. I woke up and went down to the shopping street parallel to K's house to have a leisurely breakfast of börek and coffee. Then I went to an internet café to get my fix, and most importantly, research what my next move would be. K. had told me that there was a twice-weekly ferry from Alanya to Girne in the "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus". From there I could take a shared taxi to the Turkish half of Nicosia. Would there be any problem crossing the Green Line into Cyprus proper? "No, definitely not for you, since you're European," K. had said. I decided to check this out on the internet. As reliable a source as that is-- there were varying statements about this on different travel forums. Some insisted that you could cross the Green Line, but not with luggage. But most seemed to indicate that you could cross, as long as you had a visa for Cyprus or didn't need one. Apparently Cyprus had been difficult about it for a while after the border opened in 2004, but then it got reprimanded by the European Union that it had to at least let EU citizens in under any circumstances. So it made sense to me that I wouldn't have any problems.
Plus I found a travel agency in (the southern half of) Nicosia that offered passage by sea to Egypt and Israel. Really?? I fired off an email to find out if that was true, or if that service had been suspended. In any case, there was only one way forward, and that was to Cyprus-- if I couldn't manage to get off Cyprus by sea, then I would just have to fly or figure something else out. I went to the travel agency in Alanya that sold tickets for the ferry to Girne and bought one for the next day.
My talk went quite swimmingly that afternoon, although as I had to say to K., "I like talking about my work more than I like actually doing it," a problem which I am still struggling with as I write this.
That night, my last night in Alanya, I went out on my own after K. went to bed-- I wanted to hang out at the weird "gay" bar again. K. lives on a sort of precipice right above the tourist district-- as soon as you walk out her door at night, you hear the cacophony of the discos from below. Now I am not a religious man (as you should know by now) but I do believe in Hell: and I believe that wherever it exists, it is inevitably a human creation, the "Moloch!" of Metropolis, for example.
There is something about the way 10 different sound systems blasting house music interfere with each other that I cannot describe as anything less than Satanic-- it really did sound like inhuman screams of suffering to me coming from the discos. I gulped and headed downhill into the Darkness, keeping a grip on my pure, innocent heart (which loves nothing more than the sacred sound of the guitar string and the real drum) to just get to the bar and drink a couple of beers.
It started out uneventfully-- the bar was just as dead as ever in the midst of all the chaos, the old X-ish queens sat at another table outside, and the twinky (but almost certainly straight) waiter brought me a beer. It wasn't long, though, before two boys stumbled down the alley and sat at my table. The one sitting close to me asked me if I would buy him a drink. I shook my head and tried my best to ignore him, continuing to sip my beer and smoke my cigarette.
"Ohhhh, I've had such a hard day..." he said, and through a combination of elliptical English and body language made clear that he had just been kicked out of one of the discos. No wonder, he seemed pretty drunk or fucked up on something. "How old you?"
"32," I answered.
"I'm 19," he said. Whatever he had been through, he looked pretty aged for 19. "And my friend is 17," he said, motioning to his friend. That was a bit more believable. He grabbed my beer and took a swallow. Before I could say "hey", he went on: "Are you gay?"
"Yes."
"So are you top or bottom?"
I laughed. "Both."
He didn't seem to understand this. "Top or bottom?"
"Both, sometimes I'm top and sometimes I'm bottom."
He pointed a thumb at his chest. "I'm top." Aren't they all, I thought. "I really wanna f-f-fuck you," he went on.
I shrugged. He grabbed my hand and placed it on his crotch. "My friend likes you," he said, going off on another tack. His friend nodded and while I couldn't see what his friend's hand was doing under the table, his elbow revealed that he was pumping away madly, trying to work up something for me to feel. The first boy took another swallow of my beer. I was starting to get irritated, but I kept a bemused smile on my face.
"I love you," the first boy said. At this he pulled down his cap at an angle and dipped his chin, looking at me expectantly with one eye in a rakish pose that he had learned somewhere. I was unimpressed. "Will you just give me a kiss? One little kiss?" He made a kissy-face at me. I leaned in to give him one little peck on the lips.
At this point the waiter swooped in and hissed something in Turkish at the boys. Was he telling them to leave me alone? No, it was clear from the context that it was more like, "No same-sex public display of affection in front of the bar, we could get shut down." As if the rest of the utterly filthy display wouldn't raise any eyebrows.
I was getting pretty tired of this, though. I recalled the time years ago that I took T. to a gay disco in Xxxxx where straight people aren't allowed-- I had told him to do his best not to blow his cover, and he did. When some nasty old guy took a shine to him and wouldn't take no for an answer from him, he just kept protesting "No, I can't. You see, I'm already seeing someone back in San Francisco." Which was true-- his girlfriend/fiancée. But he really did have to put up with a lot of hassle from that guy, I guess because his tactic might have implied that he would be only too glad to go home with that guy if he weren't already taken. Partly with that in mind, I decided to try a different tactic than showing only faint interest. "You know what?" I said, pulling my hand out from under the first boy's hand, which was pressing my hand against his crotch, "I don't think I feel like being a bottom tonight." I slid my hand in the direction of his ass, and he squirmed in his seat. "I look at you and that nice ass of yours and I think, I really feel like more of a top now."
He wriggled away and shook his head.
"Aw, c'mon. I bet it would be really nice to take you."
He looked a bit scared and tried to grab my hand and put it against his crotch again. I pulled my hand away.
"No, I'm not in the mood. C'mon." I started massaging my own crotch demonstratively. I winked at him exaggeratedly and chk-chk'ed.
He slid his chair back slowly, trying to keep his cool and keep looking at me with a macho suaveness. "I work at Yyyyy Café down the street... do you promise to come visit me there tomorrow? You can get breakfast."
"Sure, I will visit you."
"OK." The boy tossed his head coolly at his friend, and his friend got up too. "See you tomorrow. Maybe you change your mind."
"Nope, I doubt it-- there's only one thing I'm after now." And I made a show of craning my neck to check him out a bit from behind.
The boys finally swaggered/staggered off to find another mark. I leaned back in my chair, relieved. One more beer, then back to K's place for my last night in Turkey!
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