I always flew in to New York a day before work. Doing so eliminated risks, offered time for proper rest, and best of all the opportunity to explore the city. It was all new and fresh, plus I enjoyed the buzz that was all around me.
My usual commute started with an early morning flight to Denver with a connection to JFK. There was a morning non-stop from Salt Lake to JFK but it was always fully booked and there was a chance of not getting on.
I had a two hour sit in Denver which gave me time to have breakfast. The airport was relatively new at the time and being much larger than Stapleton there was vast expanses of indoor space to explore. Mostly though, I’d find a place to sit, watch the people coming and going, sipping coffee, and shuffling through my day planner organizing the life I had that was now taking place in three cities – Salt Lake, New York, and Helsinki.
To those who were observing my life at the time it seemed exciting and exotic. And in fact it was. Always on the go. An apartment in two cities and life in a five-star hotel in Europe. Simultaneously it was also very lonely. I didn’t have regular connections with friends because I was seldom in one place for more than a day or two. Getting things done, like laundry and grocery shopping took precedence and sleep was at a premium.
Often I’d wait in Denver and wonder as I watched people pass by what type of lives they themselves lived. Where were they going and who had they left behind. How long would they be away from home. Who might be waiting for them when they arrived. When I thought about the answers to these questions myself I felt even more lonely because the answer was no one was waiting for me whether I was coming or going. The only thing anyone really knew about me was from what was posted on a paper schedule that was hung on the refrigerator at the apartment in New York. It was a courtesy we provided to one another so that we knew who might be showing up on any given day.
Like most days, I arrived in New York and had the apartment to myself. It was evident that Alan and Chris had not been there for days as the place was hot and the air inside tight. It was July – and one of those weeks where the pavement, after having been sun baked for so long, emanated heat up through the soles of your shoes. Relaxing at home after a long day wasn’t possible in this heat so I turned on the air conditioning and decided to head out at the neighborhood gay bar for a beer or two and wait for the place to cool down.
I was the only one sitting at the bar that afternoon. The humidity was such that a cold beer was delivered in an immediately sweaty glass. The entrance and windows faced west, offering no relief from the soon to be evening sun. The bar tender and I chatted a bit, glancing occasionally at the television and commenting to one another about whatever was on.
In the mirror behind the bar I noticed there was a man sitting alone at a table towards the back of the bar. There was a bit of a double take – one because I thought I was the only one there, and two, because at first glance the guy in the mirror looked just like me. For a moment I thought it was my reflection and hence the confusion.
While another sweaty beer was being delivered I glanced again into the mirror. Our resemblance was uncanny. He sat still and rather erect, looking straight ahead, likely watching the moving pictures on the television.
With the subtle pull of my finger in the air I called the bar tender over, leaned forward slightly and asked him about the guy in the mirror. He said he’d been there for awhile. I asked him if he thought the two of us resembled one another – citing my own curiosity with this.
“As a matter of fact, yes,” he said.
I swiveled around slowly and took a look – this time without any interference of a reflected image. The other man’s posture did not change though he adjusted his glance and looked me in the eye for a moment then diverted his gaze back to screen behind the bar. There was something ethereal about this setting. The staid heat and humidity. The silence inside the bar – that from only the three of us in there, and the utter stillness of the other man at the table, alone. It felt like one of those half-lucid morning dreams when you know that you could wake yourself up – but decide not to because the dream itself is so unusual.
Having asked the bartender what the other man was drinking I walked over to his table with my beer in one hand and a full one for him in the other. “I bought one for you,” I said while sitting down adjacent to him. “And I couldn’t help notice that we look an awful lot alike.” He introduced himself as Jurgen and said that yes, he’d noticed the similarity too
We spoke briefly of the heat – he said that his hotel didn’t have air conditioning. He told me it was his first visit to the U.S. “From Germany,” he told me. While everyone has their first visit somewhere, him saying this surprised me. The contentedness with the space around him did not read as ‘first time in the U.S.’
There was more than another just another round and Jurgen’s demeanor changed to a bit more jovial as the evening went on – with his posture becoming more relaxed. His accent continued to intrigue me because it was not the guttural sound of German that was familiar. Jurgen spoke softly – not necessarily in a humble tone, but more akin to the tone one might have while reading a romance novel aloud.
After the sun had set I proposed that Jurgen come back to my apartment. “It’ll be cool in there by now.” – and I suggested that he stay the night.
“I don’t know if I should go with you,” he said aloud but probably hadn’t planned as a verbal utterance.
“Why not?” I asked
“Because you are a stranger in New York.”
“True,” I said. “But you’re a stranger from Germany.”
With a tilt of his head and a slight shrug of the shoulders and a nod, he agreed.
In the morning Jurgen and I exchanged addresses. He had a couple more days in New York and I was off to Helsinki later in the day. When I’d returned home after the trip and commuted home to Salt Lake City I found a post card in the mail from Jurgen.
This was 1997, essentially pre-internet and it must have been that we communicated by mail. I have no recollection of how we did these types of things back then. Immediate answers were impossible. Posting letters was all that was available and for me, often with a week away from home, receiving them took even longer.
However we managed it I started flying to Frankfurt to visit Jurgen regularly. I’d arrive at JFK from Helsinki, clear customs, change clothes, then head over the the Frankfurt flight and head back across the Atlantic again and arrive the next morning. Jurgen would be waiting for me just outside customs and then we’d take a train to his place, walking a few blocks finally to his apartment.
While Jurgen lived in Frankfurt he was from a small town outside of Berlin. He’d spent the majority of his life under the watchful eyes of the Stasi in East Germany. He had been a soldier in the army, marched against fascism along the Berlin Wall, and waited in bread lines most every morning. He took me to his home town once, showing me these places and marveled at the fact that an American was in his town – which he never thought possible.
Jurgen worked for Deutsche Bahn with a lifetime contact offered from the DDR that was being honored by a now unified Germany. He was a switchman – and worked at a station outside of Frankfurt walking distance from his home. He’d invite me to the station and once I went – but couldn’t go back after the initial visit. Jurgen would be alerted of an incoming train and switch the tracks with a very little window of time to do so. The trains there, of course, travel at 250km per hour – and I didn’t like being a distraction. Watching him work made me nervous.
His brother and his father also worked for the railroad – and because of their former connections, his brother had access to a small dacha outside of Berlin on a quiet lake. Jurgen reserved this for us on one of my visits. It was one degree of separation and I was secretly enamored with being the beneficiary of someone’s former communist party boss’ amenities.
We spent a week in Berlin with a friend of his who had defected to the West via Austria when the boarder there went soft. This was the weekend that Lady Diana was killed in the crash in Paris. We awoke to the news that morning.
Jurgen took me to the places where he used to spend time on the east side – which was still pretty much in shambles. I recall sitting at a cafe in East Berlin one morning and commenting on the pile of crumbled bricks in front of an apartment block – evidence of the porches having collapsed. Jurgen said it’d been that way for years. No one had bothered to make the repairs.
That night we sat in a unlit park – an empty lot really, that was adjacent to a bar that was known for severing homosexuals. The empty lot was where the connections were made. Inside the bar nothing had changed. Posters on the wall highlighted the pop stars of the DDR, wearing their modern polyester flair-legged trousers and geometric print shirts.
It was a wonderful time for both of us. I was fascinated with the whole East Berlin thing and Jurgen was the beneficiary of my travel benefits – taking him back and forth with a lifestyle he’d never anticipated.
I’d often ask Jurgen for his opinion about the things that we were doing or about something we’d seen on TV. His responses were never an opinion – usually a simple reiteration of what had already been said. Sometimes he’d say nothing at all – just a blank stare. It wasn’t a language barrier – his English was close to perfect. It was, however, a cultural barrier. An opinion shared growing up in the East could have been heard or even worse, recorded and used as evidence against him. An opinion couldn’t be shared and having one thus became a waste of mental energy. He’d been raised not to have them.
There was a time when we took at taxi to an event that was being hosted in East Berlin. Jurgen took care of planning the ride and we exited the taxi and then continued to walk blocks before arriving at the address. It took me years to understand this – but having grown up in a surveillance state he’d learned about plausible deniability. Had he been followed in the taxi there would be no evidence of a place of arrival if he could just keep walking.
On occasion, he’d fly in to spend a week with me in Salt Lake City. I took him to Las Vegas once – a place he never imagined he’d see with his own eyes. We booked a room at the Hard Rock Hotel and spent the day at the pool. Despite having grown up in the East, he took to the jet set life rather well – and frankly, it suited him. He was elegant and polite. Handsome and demure. So very gentile.
At one point Jurgen said he wanted to stay – and by that he meant stay in the United States and live with me. While I wasn’t necessarily opposed to the idea, there was no legal way to accomplish this. Though he could have stayed illegally he wouldn’t have been able to work legally and I wasn’t in a position to support him. Marriage between two men wasn’t legal then and no one would have ever imagined that it would be. Still, he felt determined to stay.
When it was time for him to head back home I flew with him to New York to ensure that he got on the plane to Frankfurt. I stayed with him until we got to the jetway door and bid him farewell. He kept walking and didn’t turn back for one last look. He was being as brave as he could be about this – and it was ripping me apart inside.
I stayed in the terminal until the plane taxied away.
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Jurgen and I stayed in touch, continuing to write letters to one another. He eventually moved back to the small town where he had grown up and bought a house next door to his brother – while renting out his condo in Frankfurt for the added income.
I visited him there years later – he was renovating the house room by room. He’d retired from the railroad early. He never said why but I do know that he was sent to an emotional recovery program by the railroad. He’d sent me a Christmas card with the facility’s return address. He told me he was ‘taking a break’. He told me about another switchman that he’d been in love with – and how they do things together, and how that man had just disappeared. Jurgen kept a photo of him on a windowsill.
The last time I saw him was ten years ago. We spent an afternoon on a bicycle trip to Poland, and as we rode along the Oder River, Jurgen told me about the stories the East German government told about Poland being part of the shared movement towards a better socialist world. He pointed to a bridge that had recently been reopened that had been barricaded off for decades. “It was such bullshit,” he said. This was the first time he’d shared an opinion with me.
The 36 Broadway 
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