A Concrete Holiday, part 1

I like airports. It's the sense of their potential, alongside their transitory emptiness that makes a strange poetic harmony. They are waiting to be filled with meaning. Which gives you the sense that anything is possible in an airport, that every choice you make has significant effect on what comes next. It's usually with hindsight that we identify the moments or spaces where our lives change. It's hard to be inspired by these moments because seen in retrospect this is where possibilities die, where futures are locked into place and where unchangeable reality is formed. Everyone has played the 'what if' game at some difficult point in their life, but at some level we all know that it's an unhealthy exercise. The events which have led to a situation can't be changed, although the readings of them can, so generally it's better to accept the present and focus on planning for the future. So what do you make then, of a situation where the present could become permanent and the future remains uncertain? It is here that we see the muscular quality of the soul, where it works to survive against such resistance and grows stronger for it. 

This year was always going to be a challenging one for me. My first solo trip overseas, my chance to throw myself into unpredictable and possibly dangerous situations and work out how to survive with a minimum of resources. I was also running, from commitments, old relationships, reality, bills and numerous fines to briefly sum it up. But I thought that I was running to something, to Europe, to the festival circuit, to another world somewhat like my own but bigger, brighter and new. Getting turned away from England was a real shock because it solidly reinforced a separation of my reality from imagined possibility. That's not to say I wasn't prepared to rethink, change plans like a sailor in the wind and keep running with the changing tide, but I returned to Turkey pretty frazzled and unhappy. What came next  was the stuff that nightmares are made of.

We went out to a rare punk gig in Istanbul. We had a crew of good people, a bottle of whiskey an our dancing shoes. Things were going well until we decided to amble over to the hamburger shop around 1am. In hindsight, this was a bad idea. Loud outfits, colored hair and bright eyes in a city known for it's conservatism and violent temper was a mistake. While waiting for the burgers, some Turkish yob took offense at my face and started pushing me around. There's something in Turkish eyes that has really scared me - it's like looking into a bottomless well, or a slow dark fire burning on an oil slick. You really don't want to mess with the Turks is all I can say. On the other hand, a loaded, fired up and resentful Captain Ruin is also a force to be reckoned with, and thus began a brawl of fairly epic proportions spanning some twenty minutes of advances and retreats, yells and screams, and the thick slap of bone on flesh and flesh on concrete. We were grossly outnumbered and it seemed that by defending ourselves we'd kicked a hornets nest, as this guy and his friends just kept on coming at us. What I really remember though were the noises. 

Fighting is like being swept away by a strong wave that sucks you under and tumbles you over and over. All you can do is struggle to right yourself (as feet fly past your face in long violent trajectories), as a world of sound and light comes pouring back in fragmented shards. A friend screaming, a man yelling, the thud of a fist landing, and the confused mass of two bodies intertwined and pumping on the ground. It's incredibly disorientating, and to make it worse I was suddenly dragged upwards by the stable fact of being grabbed and clipped into handcuffs. Beside me were my two friends looking bewildered and beaten.  Under the flouro light of a billboard we watched the crowd swirl around us like a pack of sharks as at the edges shadowy figures silently slipped away from the flashing lights. The bastards. Imagine getting attacked and then arrested!

Well. It's not an adventure until something goes wrong, right? Locked to a chair in a small room in the city cop shop, I began getting belligerent until my friend silently pointed to the dried blood stains on the wall beside me. I shut up.  From the next door came the wet sounds of smashing cabbages, as the pigs laid into another victim of the night. All up they had arrested all 5 of my friends, including two Australians, and it was something of a midnight sideshow as they paraded us out of the station and down the street to the hospital to have us given a cursory check. I had a bright shiner under one eye, and five brutal red finger marks on my neck, but otherwise had come off rather well. We were held until the next afternoon, when I was taken to a court. My Turkish friends were released, but the judge after a quick review of the evidence decided to keep me as a guest of the Turkish state until further evidence could be gathered. The police had procured a statement from a mysterious witness who said that he'd seen me waving a knife and yelling anti-Turkish sentiments. It was only at this stage that I realized that in the melee someone had been wounded, and that I, the conspicuous foreigner was being charged with their malicious injury.

We set out from the city police station just as dusk was falling in, on time like a uniformed soldier, ready to destroy the day's dreams. The reality of a long handcuffed ride into the suburbs, away from my friends and freedom. When I arrived the walls seemed so tall, and the gates like a midnight mouth to swallow my soul. I was made to strip naked, and all of my clothes and belongings were searched and some confiscated. They recorded each of my tattoos and took my finger prints. At one stage I forgot myself as the screw filled out paper work and slumped into a comfortable chair, receiving a screamed rebuke in response, and an order to stand in the corner. No presumption of innocence here then. Eventually I was issued with a blanket and a mattress an marched through the halls. Carrying a mattress on ones own is no easy feat, and there was the aspect of a Shyisipean punishment as I struggled along the lino balancing my belongings, old and new. I was put in a large, dirty and empty flouro-lit room, covered in graffiti, with several cells adjoining it's central chamber. I collapsed into an exhausted sleep around 4am, some 28 hours after the fight that seemed like it could change my life for ever.

I was brutally woken only 4 hours later by two screws standing over my bed literally screaming into my face in a vile Turkish stream, for the purposes of the morning check (which i had slept through). I learnt quickly that the prison guards demanded a formality of behaviour, which I suppose was intended to pass for respect. Respect for what, i'm not sure. The guards were slovenly, ugly and stupid as far as i could tell, with the bulging gut and bug eyes of the underpaid and undereducated. The only other prisoner in this holding room for the newly incarcerated was a sweet Syrian man named Sayheed, who had been arrested at Istanbul airport on an Interpol warrant for suspicions of terrorism, which he was entirely bemused by. Discussing his case together we reasoned that it could be connected to his business as an exporter based in China. He spoke fluent Chinese, Arabic and English. Nice man, but not one that I was to get to know well.

Later the screws came for me again, taking me from the cells and back into the prison which I now realized was significantly larger than I had suspected. I counted each turn and tried to mentally map my position against what I assumed to be East judging by the rise of the sun and the shadows on the wall. The collection of information about a wretched situation is one of the few practices that makes an oppressed man feel a little more free. Free to observe, understand and remember. I was hoping that the screws might be taking me to see a lawyer or at the very fucking least an interpreter who could explain to me what the hell was going on. So when I turned into the doorway of the prison barber, my heart froze and a silent blast of rage erupted in my mind. I grabbed the door but was pushed roughly inside. My thoughts raced by in a blur, lagging behind what was really going on. Perhaps they just wanted to take a razor to my horrible travellers' goatee? But when he began shaving my hair, my precious, idolized Mohawk, I began to really struggle, shaking my head and trying to rise out of the chair before my arms were taken and clamped behind my back by the bastard screws. Then when I continued to shake and resist I was delivered a sharp stunning blow to the temple, and I weakened, watching in the mirror as the barber added insult to injury and my blue hair fell to the floor.

Afterwards I shuffled like a zombie victim bag of shit back to the cell, and as the door slammed closed, fell slumped back against the wall and began to cry.

To be continued...

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