nablopomo

nablopomo

Back in '94, you didn't have to fake Canadian citizenship in Eastern European bars in order to avoid hour long discussions about American hegemony, since we were treated with awe and respect by foreigners BECAUSE of our stupidity, not in spite of it. This point was underscored almost as soon as we detrained, finding ourselves lounging amidst Persian rugs, smoking from 4-foot hookahs, sipping apple tea. I pulled out a flask and asked our host if he wanted a sip.

"No, I don't drink."

It wasn’t my first example of budding self-awareness/loathing as the ugly American, but it might have been the first time when all my clothes were intact, and furthermore and whatnot, I’d like to see how long I’d last circa 2006 trying to get a Muslim boozed up inside a mosque courtyard. Times, they change. For good or ill.

Our Turkish host was a gracious and beautifully intelligent man, rolling his eyes with each of our faux pas, rolling his eyes every time I tried to stoke the coal atop the tobacco blossom by myself, rolling his eyes whenever a Moon Pie crumb fell from my newly acquired beard, mixed with the tears and the blood shed by every white man who ever attempted to conquer Byzantine with Jesus upon his shoulders, rolling his eyes in the end, because why couldn’t we just buy something already and let him go home to his family.

I skipped over, of course, the scene in Kapikule, the one where I left you imagining if I had actually had sex with another man and can therefore claim I once spiked my flag atop the peak known to the intolerant as homophobia. Memories fade, however, and it would take an awfully goddamned talented psychologist to awaken suppressed recollections of male intercourse, because I’m fairly positive all I did was exchange $20 for a Turkish stamp in my passport, the blood on the article decidedly non-virginal. I am intact, physically, if not otherwise.

What is it like to enter istanbul? Imagine violating the walls of Theodosius within the glass enclosure of a moving museum tram, imagine glancing upwards into the robes of Topkapi harems, lounging like well-fed kittens, imagine confusing the highs and lows of your euphoria and hypothermia with the curvature of the Hagia Sophia, imagine if you had actually paid attention in your high school history class. That’s what it was like. Like getting a second chance. Like understanding what the hell I’m talking about. We were confused and overwhelmed and in desperate need of some southern comfort, like Kentucky Fried Chicken or Southern Comfort.

Pulling into the station at 5 kilometers per hour is still too terribly fast, especially when you’re young, to absorb the privilege of retracing history. Plus we were hungry.

We traded our dollars for what I’m sure were called lira, and we were instantly millionaires, the Ottomans as of yet too proud to understand the convenience of devaluation. In istanbul, you are never far from a meal,, though the money might be a different crusade, the vendors roasting all sorts of rotisserie meats on hand-made spits along the roadside. Some of which probably isn’t meat.

We called everything we bought ‘Turkish Pizza,’ and as our hundreds of thousands of lira dwindled to frequent runs to infrequent restrooms, we gained a vague awareness that the magnitude of history was wasted upon us.

So we did what every tourist does when he can’t think of how to spend his time in a foreign city. We looked for a cheap museum.