Countdown: 4 - Flesh of Lost Summers (Part V)

I am scared to go on. I am scared to revisit the places he took me. I am scared to look into the mirror of those memories. But more than that I am scared to show you those places, those memories, and that when I do your eyes will not see the beauty, and that your gaze will not be accompanied by understanding. I am scared your sense of morality and propriety will force me to re-evaluate something that for the longest time had been a place of refuge for me, somewhere to withdraw into and feel special, and safe, and good about myself.

But I do want to take you by the hand and take you there, you see, show it all to you, with all the passionate impatience of a child burning to show off his favourity toy, his favourite climbing tree, his secret treasure.

When my father up and left, his collection of CDs remained, for a while, until my mum did something with them and I never saw them again. It was all stuff like Marillion, Pink Floyd, Queen, U2, and Billy Joel. One day, I must have been 11, I took some of them out and listened to them. I hadn’t yet entirely given up on him, but mostly, and every song was a barb that tore up the inside of my heart.

But it was Billy Joel’s “The Stranger” that really sucker punched me. I was at an age where that particular explicitness sometimes still was needed, and I had no rents providing it. When I listened to “The Stranger” I finally understood what the Flesh Fair in “A.I.” had meant to me, and what the weird feeling had been that I’d had when I watched one and a half years before.

My mates and I had rented the Spielberg flick and watched it one afternoon. I had been 9. I’d got my first queer crush, on Jude Law’s Gigolo Joe, and that had been bad enough – to sit there with the others and realize that that feeling they had just begun to talk about, the one they got when they saw Christina Aguilera or Avril Lavigne, that I got that when I saw Jude Law. When I saw Jude Law with Haley Osment. But that hadn’t been the worst.

We’d been in the living room of Hector’s rents, and my mates had hoted and jeered at the glacial pace and the sickly-sweet sentimentalism, and for a while I had pretended to do the same. But then we had gotten to the Flesh Fair, where masterloess robots were executed on torture machines done up garishly like carnival rides and circus acts. They were dissolved with acid, drawn and quartered, and turned into sentient torches, still babbling and begging that they could still be useful. That they could still be loved.

I watched the scene in horrified fascination, lying on my belly to hide my aching hard on. I knew we were supposed to wait in breathless suspense whether the little girl would manage in time to save the boy-robot David, Gigolo Joe and the walking, talking Teddy Bear. My mates were cheering the robot-destroyers on, calling for the death of David so that the film would be over. And I, I too wished for the girl to be too slow, hoped for him to end up on one of the machines… but I yearned for it, because I wanted to be him.

I wanted to be that parentless robot child, wanted for Gigolo Joe to hold my trembling hand and tell me the sweet lies we tell children to deceive them into believing the world is not as monstrous as it really is. I wanted him, wanted myself to be torn from those arms, crying, begging and struggling, and then be tortured to death in front of an applauding crowd.

Never before had I been so turned on. And for over a year it terrified me. Being queer was one thing. I mean for a 10 year old that is bad enough. But to be… this?

So, when Billy Joel asked me, did I ever let my lover see the stranger in myself, I finally understood who I had met that day. And when he told me not to be afraid, that everyone has a face they hide away forever, relief washed over me. It was probably the last kindness, the last fatherly act my dad did for me.

Still, for a long time afterwards, I only took that face out and wore it in the cold solitude of my fantasies, by night under the covers of my bed. I didn’t show it to Colin, or Jonas, and not even to ‘Nette, and I never would have dreamed of showing it to Hendrik, though I might have suspected that the part in me that craved him so, his ruthlessness and cruelty, was very close to that strange in myself.

But I want you to keep in mind that long before I lost my angel wings and stepped over that invisible threshold that seperates innocent children from perverted men, that demon was already living in my heart. Whatever you may think of Hendrik, after I am done telling you about him, it wasn’t him who fucked me up.

Had it been illegal what he did? Probably. Had it been morally wrong? Maybe. Did it hurt me? Oh yes. It still does. But I had wanted it, for years, before it finally happened.

***

Nothing would have happened, I suppose, had it not been for my failing grades in 3rd form. I had spent most of the winter 06/07 in emergency rooms, police cars, arrest cells, and doing increasing lengths of community service, and the bill for my lack of school attention and even attendance was due. At the end of the first term it clear that only a miracle could keep me from having to repeat the year. Given that professional tutoring services were too expensive I asked my form teacher Mrs. Nastarowitz, and she promised she’d ask around amongst the older pupils.

My football performance had suffered considerably as well. At 14 football was no longer the centre of my universe. I had put my dreams of beomding a professional away together with my LEGO building blocks.

Hendrik was still our assistant coach, but he, too, had been less active since he’d gotten himself a girlfriend, a surprisingly ugly girl, one year younger than him, with a crooked nose and kinky, caramel hair. He had also grown lean with his last growth-spurt, had shaved his once shaggy hair down to a skullcap of brass coloured fuzz, and looked so lean and mean it hurt.

One Friday in April he came up to me after training. He wore a black tracksuit with red and gold piping, and black football boots. The cleats clacked loud on the tiles of the corridor to the changing rooms.

“Yo. Nasty Rowitz tells me you need some help.”

I was tired and spattered with mid, and I had to get up very early the next morning for weekend community service. The nights were still crispy cold, and steam was rising from my body.

“Yeah. Math, and chemistry, and physics, and…”

“And French,” he said, looking me up and down like a buyer checking out the merchandise. “I know.”

And after a pause: “I take 10 an hour. And I expect you to give it a lot more than you did here today. You will take this serious, understood?”

“You will tutor me?” I couldn’t believe it.

There was that rare flash of a smile, the twinkle in the eye of a distant god.

“If you don’t fuck it up. Monday, after school, my place.”

And Hendrik, the boy I had dreamed of for the past 4 years, gave me his address and his mobile phone number.

As a tutor he was as strict as he was as football coach. He took the time to figure out exactly where my problems lay and he was good at explaining things, but he expected me to study hard and to mindlessly practice all the formulae and vocab.

It started pretty early on. We met two times for two hours every week, that was 40 Euros I’d have to play my mum back somehow. We sat at the dinner table in his rent’s flat, catercorner, so that he could read over my shoulder.

When he saw me making a mistake, he only would snort quietly, not “God you are stupid”, somehow, but always “Jeeze, you know you can do better than that.”

And, like, from the second time on, his leg would touch mine under the table. And his elbow would touch mine on the table. Or his hand, lying innocently there, his fingertips would brush against my hand when I reached the end of the page.

And then, maybe the second week, the third at the latest, I had not done my homework. I did it probably half on purpose, to test him, the way I tested teachers, and rozzers, and social workers, to see how much I really had to conform, and what was merely expected bit without the stomach to enforce it.

I told him I’d forgotten to do it, my expression 4/5th contrition and 1/5th challenge. He hit me with the open hand right in the face. He didn’t pull it. My hand whipped around and I tasted blood.

I jumped up and wanted to punch him, but he just leaned back, looking at me from half-lidded eyes.

“That was your only screw-up, got that? Next time, you’re out, Tavi.”

It was the first time he’d used that name since the night on the bus. I couldn’t believe he remembered at all. All the fight went out of me and I sat back down.

“Are we clear?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yes.”

“Yes what, Tavi?”

“Yes, Sir.”

A smile crept into the corners of his eyes. It wasn’t a friendly smile, and it never reached his mouth, but it made me shiver. It wasn’t telling me he was fucking proud, but still, I wanted to make him smile like that again. And again.

But I didn’t know how to, and so for another week I studied hard and did my stuff and had a hard-on through all those hours that he kept touching me.

It was his girlfriend that picked the moment for me. She called him during one of the tutoring sessions, and he stepped out into the hall with the phone. He left the door ajar, and I listened.

They talked about something I can’t remember, because it paled to insignificance next to the thing he said at the end. She probably asked him when they could meet, or something, and he said, with a sigh: “Got to stay here with that little creep I told you about. Once I’m rid of him, I’ll head out.”

The disappointment was more than I could handle. All those days, all those moments, touching me, it had all just been in my head. I could feel the tears burning in my eyes, the shame in my cheeks. I could hear him say good-bye on the phone and walk back towards me. I knew that in a few seconds he would see the shame on my face.

When he returned to the living room I attacked without warning. Like Lukas Hendrik knew how to fight, and like Lukas he was a lot bigger and stronger than me. It didn’t take him long until he had me on the ground on my back, arms pinned under his knees. But his lips were bloody.

“You listened, Tavi.”

“Don’t call me that!”

“Fuck you, Tavi! I’ll her whatever I like. It’s none of your fucking business!”

“Don’t call me that!”

And then he kissed me, long, longer, saturated with the taste of his blood.

It was the last fight I had until the one with Samuel, except for the one with that lady rozzer, and as I told you, that doesn’t count.

Countdown: 4 - Flesh of Lost Summers (Part IV)

And then there was Hendrik. Oh, how do I describe Hendrik to you?

I have known Hendrik for the best part of my life. He is four years older than me, and he played for the same football club as Orcun, Hector, Leo, and I. The first time he made an impression on me was when he acted as ref during my F-Youth days – that is football aged 7 and 8. He was only 12, but there was already something about him I adored, right from the start. He was without mercy. Once he made a call, you knew there was nothing you could do to change his heart, and any attempt to argue just resulted in a foul being given against you. He applied the rules very strictly, but he was fair, and as far as I know always correct. He knew his stuff.

I began paying attention to him, watched him when he played himself, or when he hung out at the club house with his mates, or when he just helped Coach or older players stow away stuff, take care of equipment, and so. Hendrik was always a bit stocky, at times almost chubby, but in that firm, supple way that makes you think of a powerful, aggressive dog, or a tiger, or a wolverine. His hair, usually worn longish and shaggy, was a rich, dark blond that depending on the light could be the tawny colour of honey or the shimmering green gold of tarnished brass.

He was a quiet bloke, and rarely smiled. He didn’t scowl either, but just seemed to watch things in a detached, almost serene way. He was almost always at the club, either playing or helping or watching. He was never particularly close with anyone, but he was never an outsider either. And when you looked into his eyes – though I suppose few ever did except me and Coach – you knew that he didn’t miss much, and that he always knew what he wanted.

As a player he never lost his cool, but there was a grit in him, a deep, smouldering fire that wouldn’t ever let him give up. Oh, he could be tactical, even devious in his attempts to get his will, on the pitch or off, but he never waivered.

I always tried to be like Hendrik, as a football player, to be equal to his focus, his courage, his ruthlessness, and his absolute will to win.

And then came 2003. I was in E-Youth. Hendrik, who turned 14 that July, was in C-Youth. Coach had asked him to be his permanent assistant on our team, and we’d seen a lot more of him. Coach had always trained us to be efficient and goal-oriented – no “it’s not if you win or lose, it’s how you play the game” hogwash – but Hendrik made us bend the rules to the breaking point. ‘Thinking outside the box’ was what he called it, to win, and to win by wider margins.

“It’s only a foul if the ref gives it,” he told us. “And even the, sometimes it’s worth it. Sometimes a booking, and at the end of the game even a send-off can be worth it, if it gives us a tactical advantage. Just be smart about it.”

We practiced awareness of when we were invisible to the ref, and how to create diversions that drew attention away from a player about to commit such a tactical foul. I know it is bad form, it’s considered unsportsmanlike, but I still say that there was something very sporting about it: it wasn’t just that we played only against our opponents, but also against the system itself. The challenge, the fun and joy of it, is being so good, so quick, so deft and perceptive that you can get away with it. For after all a rule or law is only as good as it is enforceable. Following it is not a necessity, but a choice. You just have to be aware of the consequences. Later I applied all of that to my career as a crook, but I learned it from Hendrik on the football pitch. Don’t they say that sports teach you for life?

You can imagine how as our team moved up in our league we got a rep as grade A bastards.

***

I knew that Hendrik was paying me some attention also. I certainly did everything I could to impress him, and slowly I became one of his favourite players. I started out as a winger, because of my size, but eventually I was made centre forward. But still, he never seemed fully content with my performance, and always wanted me to exhaust myself more, play more aggressive, and more daring.

“It’s not your job to be careful, Ricky. Leave the defence to Bariş, Leo, Cem, and the others. It’s your job to score and to help Hector to score. Nothing else matters.”

And when I complained that he was less harsh judging Hector, he ginned without humour: “Hector is content to be merely good. If I push him harder, he’ll walk. And I don’t have anyone better to replace him with. You, you want to be the best. You I can kick as much as I like, and you’ll come back for more. So, yeah, I expect more from you. A lot more. And you know you can give it.”

There was that one game that summer, an away game against a team from Halle, in Saxony. We’d screwed them the last time we’d played them with two unlawful scores. So the tone of the game was hostile from the kick-off. They were fairly secure at the lower mid-table of our league, and they needed a win less than they needed to avoid another lost game, so they’d decided to stonewall us all through, with only occasional passes and quick strikes when we neglected our own defences too much.

It had rained hard not just through the game but for the last couple of days, and the pitch had turned into a mud bath. The game was almost over, we might even have been in stoppage time, and no goal had been scored by either side. We were all exhausted, and very frustrated after 90 minutes of railing futilely against this wall of disdain.

I had just made a solitary run down the right wing, to open up their left flank. Hector had been supporting me, while our two other forwards got into position. But when I tried to pass to them directly over the centre backs of the Hallensers, one of them had leaped up gracefully and blocked it with his head. The ball had fallen down, and they drew four of their defenders together around it, apparently intending to slowly pass it back to their goalie. Everyone was waiting for the ref to end the game, and they only meant to kill the remaining time.

I was still running lightly in the direction I had kicked the ball, and threw a quick glance over my shoulder towards Hendrik, who was standing at the sidelines. Through the rain I could make out his set jaw, and the cold fire in his eyes, his angry, withheld disappointment, nay, loathing with us.

It was still only moments after they had blocked the ball, and they were still ambling around each other, tired and lacklustre in spirit themselves. Their goalie was slowly approaching them, leaving the goal wide open. And then I understood the mistake they had made, in their wishful thinking that the game was already over, and picked up speed again. I ran as hard as I could, my thighs protesting with sharp pains, my ankles groaning and trembling with the stain of having to stay steady on slippery ground, until I was an arrow aimed at the heart of their defence. Only one of their defenders saw me coming, and he shouted to alert his slowpoking mates, but it was too late. I knew I couldn’t shoulder through the three bloke wall between me and the ball. The ball was still just outside the penalty box, so even if I hurt one of them, or tripped them, it probably wouldn’t result in a penalty kick against us, and anything else wouldn’t make any difference at this point. So I dropped down to one knee, the other leg outstretched, and on a wave of mu and water I slid through between their legs, kicked the ball, and scored.

When blokes understood what I had just done – reasonably certain that everyone was just then staring at the goal, and given the poor visibility, and that I was hidden behind the thicket of their legs – all of them kicked me as hard as they could. All the anger we had so justly incurred all through the season, and all the mute, cold frustration of this long, wet game went into those kicks.

And then the ref’s whistle signalled the end.

Hendrik carried me back to the bench himself. Before the designated game medic (the father of one of the blokes who’d just vented on me, actually, and who as an EMT by profession) began patching up my bleeding face, Hendrik hugged me quickly, and hard enough to make me groan in pain, and whispered: “That was fantastic, Ricky. Fucking fantastic. I am so fucking proud of you!”

It was the first time he said it, and I knew I would willingly put my right arm into a meat grinder to have him say it again.

My back was one big bruise, and I had serious trouble breathing. The medic gave me a shot that made me woozy and faintly high but reduced that sense of suffocating. They debated if I should get checked out at the hospital in Halle, but in the end decided against it. On the bus ride back, Hendrik had me lie on the backseat of the bus, where I could stretch out, and put my head in his lap, partly to make sure I was okay and didn’t pass out or anything, and partly to ease my breathing by taking pressure from my chest.

It was late as we drove back, and almost dark outside. Everybody was excited and relieved that we’d won after all, and talking loudly over the thundering diesel engine, and the hard rain, and the evening rush hour traffic on the A9 northbound towards Berlin.

Hendrik put his hand on my head.

“Try to sleep, brave Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.”

“What’d you call me?” I whispered back.

“Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. You know, the mongoose from the story, the one that follows the cobra into its lair and kills it.”

“I know the story. My sister calls me the same. She calls me Tavi.”

“She’s a bright girl, then. Now try to sleep.”

The bus was shaking us gently. My cheek rubbed against the smooth nylon fabric of his trackie bottoms, damp from the rain. Mostly he kept both his arms stretched out along the top of the seat’s back, like a relaxed Jesus on the cross, but every now and then (when nobody was looking?) he put one warm, strong, heavy, and slightly sweaty hand on my shoulder or my head, and would as if absentminded tousle my hair. For a while Coach sat with us, offering to spell him, but he said I’d just fallen asleep (which I dutifully pretended to be, after that), and he’d rather not wake me. They’d talk quietly for a while, and then Coach went back up the aisle to keep the rest of the team in check. The red and white lights of the passing cars got caught in the rivulets and raindrops on the deep indigo windows.

And in my memory I held firmly the image of his face, as he’d hugged me, carrying me across the pitch, both of us rain-drenched and muddy, and as the blood from my nose had soaked the arm of his track suit. I held the fire in his eyes, no longer cold, but fiercely hot, like a furnace, as he said: “I am so fucking proud of you.”

So what do you expect? Of course I fell for him. I fell like a ton of bricks. But this was football. Football players aren’t queer. Even in 2003 that still just didn’t happen. Period. I kept being one of his star players, at least as long as I didn’t slacken and kept the performance of the team in higher regard than my personal well-being or my good name as a sportsman, but he never called me Tavi again, and he never held me again. He never even let me sit next to him on the bus, or join in a conversation he was having with mates his own age, or anything. He was strictly business, and I didn’t dare to push that boundary.

So for the best part of the following year, all through winter, I pined for him from afar, and did what I could to stay in his good books, and dreamed of him doing nameless, ill-imagined things to me at night. I came out to ‘Nette, and Lukas found out about me and told ‘Nessa. And in spring Tariq caught my eye, and for a while I put my desire for Hendrik aside as unattainable. But I never forgot him.

Chapter Five: Duct Tape Is Silver (Part V)

In Edinburgh I finally returned to my webspace. You didn’t think I learned to write such stunning prose in school, did you? Nah, I had a nice space on Yahoo, the old 360 that they eventually got rid of, where I had virtual friends, and where I could write the stuff nobody in my real life could give a flying fuck about. In fact, a lot of what I’m telling you hear first appeared on Y360 and, when that was gone, on multiply.

I had established my online presence in early ’07, mostly putting up Neil Gaiman quotes, taking the piss in the comments on other blokes’s pages, and chatting with dirty old men.

Amongst my regulars were JD, an Asian-Australian Christian, who had begun by wanting pics of my naked chest but ended talking with me mainly about literature and films, “Uncle Ed”, the obese, insecure shoe salesman from New Jersey, who wanked while telling me to mend my ways, Jim, the retired analyst living in a cabin in the Michigan wilderness and tending his vegetable patch, who couldn’t for the life of him admit that he was into young blokes, and who believed that we were all “God’s DNA”. And then there was Master Daddy Matt, the black father of two teenage daughters, who dreamed of having a white boy slave.

Not all of the were naughty, mind you. Queer, positive, ex-speedhead Shawn, for example, busily working on his budding career as playwrite and off-broadway director, made it clear that he wouldn’t talk with me about anything sexual until at least my 18th birthday. We had begun chatting when I was 14, so if that had been his aim, he certainly had been in it for the long haul. We were just pen pals and mutual blog commentators, and a great source of advice both on the seedy and the artistic side of life.

I hadn’t blogged, mailed, or chatted with anyone for over a month when I went back online from the ESCape Internet Café on London Road in the New Town of Edinburgh on August 13, four days after I had left Leeds. My online friends were suitably impressed about my daring, or dutifully admonished me to be sensible and return to my mum, though I suspect most of them didn’t believe a word of what I told them. Only Jim actually figured out a way to follow my IP addresses and reluctantly agreed that I wasn’t fibbing after all. He also became an increasing pain in the arse about me stopping this nonsense.

The other thing I returned to in Edinburgh was regular training. When I had been nine years old my unacceptably frequent and violent fights got me sent to a kiddie shrink and to Ergotherapy. After I had made it absolutely clear that I’d rather die a thousand death than suffer through rhythmic dancing, the therapist proposed Aikido. And once I started going to the Dojo my fights really did seem to abate. Of course, then my dad up and left, and two years later after a fashion so did ‘Nette. That was when things became really bad, rozzers and all.

But ever since then I trained martial arts almost religiously. I always liked how it complemented football. Football was about interacting with the external world, about strategy, and friendship, and fighting the enemy. Martial arts was about the internal enemy, about discipline.

Some people have raised eyebrows and commented that it was really stupid to teach a troubled, violent kid how to dish out hurt more efficiently. But I am certain, if it hadn’t been for Aikido and for my sensei, I would have become a killer a long time ago. It really helped, you know.

Anyway, a while ago my sensei had kicked me out of the Dojo for dishonourable behaviour. But I continued to train on my own, mostly up on the roofs above Berlin. I even did it while locked up in juvie. It helped calm my nerves. But when I got back out, I stopped. The internal enemy had won, so it seemed. What was the point of continuing to fight?

In Edinburgh I returned to training. I went for regular runs in Holyrood Park. Those two weeks in spent in Edinburgh it was raining almost constantly. Seriously. Even by British standards it must have been the wettest August in ages. Once it got so ba the sewers backed up all the way into the flat where I was crashing. I woke to screams of disgust and the stink of sewage soaking into the carpets.

I learned to love running up and down Arthur’s Seat in the pouring rain. The sweat and rain and mud all would become one and I would almost succeed in dissolving myself in all the grey, brown, and green.

Mostly I ran so I wouldn’t lie awake on the couch, chasing sleep that kept eluding me. There was too much I didn’t want to think about as I lay there and stared up at the ceiling. To avoid that my choices were exhausting myself to the point of collapse or drinking myself into a stupor. On some nights I resorted to the latter, but even I knew I’d feel much better the next day when I did the former.

Of course, after a week of this Charley introduced me to Ponyboy. I continued training, but by then I had other things to distract me during the nights.