MEN DON'T CRY
a novel by Ercan Akbay

1974

1
THE SCHOOL

I started this school in 1970, when I was an eleven year old boy with a seemingly extraordinary mind for having passed the tests to enter the most prestigious colleges of the country. For the simple reason that the school was on the other side of the Bosphorus I was a boarding student. At that time, neither Istanbul’s first bridge had been built, nor did the population of the city has reached two millions yet.
My mother couldn’t hold back her tears as she spread the sheets on my new bed the first day. Yet I was calm; almost like I was eager to know of the truths to life as soon as I could and become a real man standing on his own two feet. I remember my new mates all begging to stop their parents leaving them, and crying out their eyes on that sunny Sunday. Knowing that all these wouldn’t change anything, I stood strong with a smile on my face, bidding farewell to my teary-eyed mother patting my head.
That day was the beginning of an exciting adventure for me; but I have to confess that being a boarder was a hard thing. Although there were many nice and funny sides to be away from home, you needed to spend at least a couple of years in the dormitories of this rough world to become a man who didn’t cry.
By the time we reached the age of fourteen, leaving behind all those obstacles, we’d all became pretty sophisticated. You become what you see; we had turned into potty-mouthed, heavy-smoking and wine drinking street dogs just like our senior brothers were; tough and handsome... The wine we swigged, of course, was nothing but a plastic-capped Dogkiller, and the smokes were ninety-kurush-a-pack non-filters.
Winter came early towards the end of 1973. It was only the middle of November when it snowed, making it difficult for the non-boarding students to get to school. For us boarders it meant nothing more than a change of scenery, caused by a big white blanket of snow in the yard of the old pine trees leading all the way to the shore. We were stuck inside studying in the cold study rooms under the bright, flickering fluorescent lights and going to bed early so that we could wake up before dawn the next morning. There weren’t things like TV or anything else to entertain us in the evenings. Some of the mornings, we would wake up an hour before the usual time and head down to the yard to play some soccer excitedly.
That was almost all the show we got…
Rarely done by the lower-class boys, though, there was another exciting thing to do; to escape from school at night time. The usual destination was an all-night teahouse by the sea, which offered nothing that could be of interest for children our age, except for a pool table and a black-and-white television. It was more a place for retired or jobless men who play cards and smoke water pipes aimlessly, but hell; the important thing was to escape over that fenced, long wall of school. It was hard to find anything more creative to do at the time. We weren’t old enough to go to brothels or whore-houses like the senior boys did.
To escape from the school for a boarding school kid was a maturity test for becoming a real bummer, and passing this test wasn’t an easy thing to do: the enemy had taken every kind of precaution there was. They were severely cautious during the time when we were to graduate from junior-high in March of 1974 they even chase the tomcats on the roof away.
But though they possessed all the boundless opportunities of the government, they knew nothing about the mind and abilities of the new generation, and yet they haven’t met the brains behind the gang Zorba…

2
THE GANG

“Tell me the name of the Italian delegate of the United Nations…”
I leaned both of my hands on his chest. “Fuck off, boy! Are you kidding me? Everybody’s onto the Japanese delegate now,” I said. Pushed him right down on the broken desk he’d stood up from. He was pinned to the desk.
You had to show some manners to a jerk that makes such old-fashioned jokes.
“Who’s the Japanese delegate?” he asked.
He was dying of curiosity. I whispered the name in his ear. His small eyes narrowed, and he burst out his laugh that resembled a girly shriek. The other pubescent freaks in the study room perked up their ears, and I started to laugh, too. On occasions like this, we used to laugh like a mad on purposely just so that they would say, ‘Hey, those guys are having a lot of fun’ and envy us.
Delegate jokes back then were the thing made-up names we invented out of Turkish words that sounded like the respective country’s language. As you might assume, there wasn’t one out of these names that wasn’t in some sort of dirty slang when pronounced.
In one of the classrooms of the old building that each held thirty people, twelve of us were studying. The front seats were always empty in this study hall. Then came the hard-working boys right behind the front row; they actually did what we all were supposed to do there. Lastly, the right corner of the back row was occupied by us, members of Zorba.
The fact that we had that name, it didn’t mean that we were bullies or anything; we weren’t. The Turkish word for ‘bully’, Zorba, happened to be made of the first letters of our names. As for the gang part, well, it’s not like we could call ourselves a soccer team or an orchestra, so we had to be a gang. It wasn’t very likely that we would carry out illegal business in a boarding school anyway. Our fields of interest were limited to gambling, sports or fight organizations, and artistic cultural activities like comic book publishing. From time to time, we did carry out activities that weren’t one of the usual, but exceptions didn’t count.
Our first letter, Ziya, was the class rep. We used to call him the ‘Division Clerk.’ He knew a lot about official requests and bureaucracy and he covered up for guys who cut class. He was the only serious and hard-working student among us, one of the members of ‘absolute necessity’ for every gang of representation, so that we did not clash with the inner-laws of the system. A pimpled, white skinned boy with brown wavy hair, Ziya was a guard at our class soccer team, a largely built guy but fast runner.
That short, blond, blue-eyed member of the gang, Oguz, who was twitchy as Jerry Lewis, was a non-stop talker. He cursed and talked dirty all day long, telling jokes and selling Disney and Lucky Luke stickers that stuck with the help of some water. He was known as the ‘central distributor’ of the school for trading of goods like these. Since he was ultra-hyperactive, there wasn’t any crime or incident he wasn’t involved in, including gambling organizations. His cheeks were raw from the continuous slaps he’d gotten from study hall surveillants.
Renan, the so-called ‘intellectual’ of the gang, was a dark, scrubby haired thick guy with drowsily looking eyelids. Although the only stuff he read was trash novels, he considered himself well-informed on every subject. Whenever there was a fight, he would carefully take off his big black-rimmed glasses, hand them to someone trustworthy, and roll up his sleeves. The owner of the grocery store across from the school was his brother-in-law, so he was in charge of transporting the illegal goods we imported from there and clearing them through customs into our dorms. He was an irreplaceable asset to the gang if only for this reason. He could only be a substitute player for the soccer team because of his eye-glasses.
As for me, I had nothing special about me other than self-confidence, a cool, calm and collected personality, and a talent for creative planning. I was a skinny, pale kid with curly brown hair. I read a lot but hadn’t started to wear glasses at the time. On the soccer team, I was positioned for the ‘strategic missions’ in the forward field.
Ayhan was the star of the gang, a tall, muscled, dark-haired guy who had blossomed into a handsome young man a little earlier than us. Captain and striker of the soccer team, a good writer and cartoonist, and a clever, good-hearted guy with lots of common sense. The shy expression on his face in his first day of school was why nobody gave any attention to him but me. That same day, we became some sort of Siamese twins.
He was my best friend, right from the heart.
The last year of junior high, we were all around fourteen years old and there wasn’t any other group of boarders living a worse life than us. We had embraced gambling, wickedness and generally being punks; every kind of nuisance there was, early on in our lives, and they had become things we wouldn’t give up.
See, its not the way you think; it wasn’t like I was the leader of the gang. There could be no leader of Zorba; we took pride in our leader-free, anti-authority institution. Procedures for any event were settled by the gang member who knew the most about the particular event.
Since Ayhan was the earliest to reach physical maturity among us, he used to solve any problems that needed physical power. He was also the chief editor of our magazine. I was the creative power of the gang, I would design the working and operational plans of our various businesses and bring them to the table. The gang had a pluralist voting system going on, and there were two of us who used to carry out the forgery and smuggling decisions: Ziya and Renan. The organization of any kind of gambling, sales and marketing, or collection was meticulously carried out by Oguz .
As boarders in the same class, twelve of us in total, we slept in two side by side dorms each holding six of us. The gang consisted of the permanent holders of five beds in dorm number 13.
The sixth member, the one who ran our errands, was our slave.
People who think that slaver societies have vanished in modern times are ignorant and know nothing about how schools are run. An oppressive and primitive regime lived on with all its cruelty in our school. The weak and unarmed boys were given hell in the dorms and study halls, they were the subject of all mean jokes and torment, and they were forced to do all the dirty errand jobs.
That night, during the dinner break between the two study halls, Ayhan was giving evening instructions to the Arab, our dorm slave. “Arab, boy… Quick, go grab the bottle of wine from our common locker and hide it under the bed. And don’t get caught. Cover it with a track suit so nobody sees it.”
“What was the number of the locker it was in?”
Ayhan got angry at him and shouted, “Twenty-six. Still can’t learn one simple locker number? Do we have to beat you every night, you stupid bastard?”
The Arab was famous for his out of focus, silly questions and making the gang angry by asking them. We were suspicious that he did this on purpose.
“Just asking, mate,” he murmured, bending down his thick eyebrows. “Is the key in the mopboard next to the locker?”
The number of lockers that our gang had used to hide things were never voiced out loud and the rumor around was that the lockers actually belonged to the upper class boys instead.
Rightfully, Ayhan went crazy with rage. “Come here right now!” he called Arab down in front of himself, and gave him two slaps from where he sat. The sound that came out of the kid’s dark cheeks echoed off the classroom walls. At times like this, Arab’s jaw would clench shut and his face would freeze, but he never let a tear escape from his eyes.
“Please don’t hit me, mate…”
“You’ll get two slaps every day ’cause you’re spoiled, boy. Look at this fucking dog! If you go around shouting this dorm’s secrets ever again, I swear to God I’ll beat you all night long. Understood?”
“Understood...”
“Now get lost!”
I remember so well, in one of those moments Oguz  had entered the study hall. Because there was ‘jungle’ at dinner, the only thing he ate was some dessert and he was half-starved. This time it was him who called Arab to his side just as he was heading out. Arab could only say, “Yes?” with a distressed voice.
“Bring me toast and coke from the canteen on your way back. Make sure the toast’s well-pressed, as thin as a piece of paper,” he ordered carelessly.
“Sure, mate,” he said, waiting.
Sticking his hand in his pocket, Oguz grabbed a handful of coins left over from the daily gambling session. He took a few and handed them to Arab. “This should cover it.”
It was hard to survive boarding school life without knowing the unwritten rules well. If there was ‘jungle’ going on in the cafeteria, and if you didn’t have any money to buy food from the canteen, you would definitely starve. We lived under an order in which the strong and the fast left the weak hungry.
The ‘jungle law’ was a kind of a ‘marshal law’ declared by the authorities of the senior classes, for the times when we had something good on the dinner menu. For rare dishes like steak, lady-thigh meatballs, stuffed rice, and for sweets like shambaba cake or fruits like bananas, this declaration was made by our senior brothers who were the grand authority. Under jungle law, as soon as the dinner bell rang, there were exclamations of ‘Allah Allah!’ and a dash to the twelve-person dinner tables, where the quickest to reach them had the right to consume as much food as they could get.
I was a tiny, skinny boy who hadn’t physically matured yet. To survive among my peers, I had to be on the ball. When it was the jungle law, I found ways to sneak out before the bell rang and to use my wits to keep from going hungry. I got so cunning by the third year that when I needed a haircut, I would take a look at the barber’s apprentice, not the barber himself…
The barber can’t cut his own hair, but isn’t it obvious he would cut his helper’s?

3
THE STUDY HALL

Jungle law had been declared during dinner because of the special grilled meatballs, and after dinner three punks from the next class showed up in the study hall. Oguz immediately started quizzing me about who the Japanese delegate of the UN was. I acted like I didn’t know the answer. He was glad and tilted his head back like a samurai and yelled out the name of the Japanese guy, which was nothing but a heavy swearing. The assholes couldn’t stop laughing, so Oguz took the opportunity to sell them the NGA from the week before and got fifteen kurush out of them. As a matter of fact, fifteen bucks was only the price to read the magazine, two hours later it was collected because there was no other copy.
Our surveillance teacher got mad at us as he entered the room and saw the magazine and the commercial activity going on in class. We gathered ourselves and sat down on our chairs. It was eight-thirty. We have eaten our dinner, have had some fun, and now began to think about what in the world there was to do during the last hour long study session. I went over to sit next to Ayhan. We’d been publishing a weekly humor magazine called NGA. We’d draw sketches of filthy humor with a pencil and create that single copy which was then passed on to everyone.  It had gotten to be really popular. In the beginning, everyone had wondered about this underground magazine that was being published for nine straight weeks and its strange name. We put the meaning of the name on last week’s cover. We considered it very creative:
NGA (n., slang) the moan-like exclamation uttered by young men while jerking off.
We used to draw a film poster for the cover of each issue. This was very serious work, with the film’s amazing name in great big letters at the top along with the names of the made-up movie stars who were acting in it—these were all cartoon versions of people from school—then graphic sketch works scrawled under that. And that week’s film was A Streetbus Named Desire, starring Mike Fake, Growshot Hawshot and Jenifer Buttfucker, in which the players were passionately ‘rubbing up’ against each other inside a bus in as dirty a way as we could draw.
At the bottom there were notes about the guest stars and movie theater, like, ‘This film is playing to a closed house because the audience didn’t come,’ or, ‘Our refreshment counter offers delicious sodas that aren’t even flat,’ or, ‘This movie was shot in there: There Film Studios.”
That was more or less the format of NGA.
The cover for the last issue was done, and now we were working on a mini-series strip making fun of Star Trek, the most popular TV show of the year. Ayhan had his tongue sticking out and was drawing some pictures, and I was telling him all the funny ideas I had. The magazine had to be ready tomorrow.
The star of the NGA version of Star Trek was Mesut the Donkey. He was the slave of dorm number 11, the one next to ours. A hilarious guy… He would try to rebel against the local authority, who were the dorm gang- he’d rat people out, he’d tell on them and cry in the principal’s office, but he still couldn’t get out of being a slave. In our comic strip, we drew him as someone from the planet of the donkey-heads, who was doing clown duty on the Starship Enterprise. Donkey was the anti-hero, who starred in replacement of pointy-eared Mr. Spock. He would mess around with the ship’s devices and break them, or some space meteor would hit him on the head, or he would fall over into a crater on a satellite of Jupiter. Pretty much every kind of thing used to happen to Mesut in this unique plot.
It wasn’t enough for us to be cruel and make all the slaves like the Arab and the Donkey suffer. We also thought we were entertaining everybody by insulting the slaves in our miserable little magazine. This one time, the Starship Enterprise was damaged while in orbit over Mesut’s planet. A crew of three -including Mesut- land on the planet with the research craft to explore and find argonium crystals to repair the ship’s engines.
“Boy,” I said to Ayhan, “now they should run into some male donkeys with giant penises. Mesut can speak their language, right, and explains the situation, asks them where to find the argonium crystals.”
Glaring at me with a serious face, “Yeah, and then what?” he asked me roughly. He was trying to tell whether I was serious or not.
“Then the donkeys throw the whole crew in jail because Mesut says a dumbfuckthing that pisses the donkeys off. They tie up Mesut and ask, ‘Mogambo or Death?’ When he says he prefers Mogambo, they shoot him in the ass with an injector made of donkey dick. After that...”
“Whoa there!” Ayhan cut me off, which wasn’t very polite, but he must have thought my idea was way too much. “Don’t be an idiot… The Donkey gets the magazine tomorrow and he’ll go straight to the principal’s office. Then we’ll be in deep shit.”
“So just because it’ll make dear Mr. Mesut the Donkey mad, we just don’t publish the magazine?? We’ll punch him in the mouth a couple times and he won’t be able to say anything,” I spitted out.
I was teasing Ayhan. He was the one who liked to get in fights to show off and act tough, and normally he would be the one to suggest this, but now I was acting like we had switched roles. We laughed a little and he reminded me of the infamous joke I shocked him with on his first day back from Izmir staying at our house.
Ayhan’s family was from Izmir. When his father, some high-level bureaucrat of the government, was assigned to Istanbul, Ayhan transferred on the second semester of prep year from Bornova High School to ours. He had some problems mingling in with us in the beginning, but he had a warm, honest and tough way about him that eventually won us over.
Despite our many opposite characteristics, I and Ayhan’s friendship was a real one. It was really different from the way it was with the other members of the gang. We were like brothers; each one made up for what was missing from the other and tried to make school life easier for each other. We had definitely learned that the most important thing someone needed at the school was his friends. A boy was torn away from all family ties and brought to a place ruled by completely different rules and relationships. The only way he could adapt to his new situation was with the help of the friends he found there. A friend was everything at boarding school. You shared your food and your money, you kept the wolves at bay, and you were there for him on his lonely nights.
Notebooks, textbooks and classes were secondary for a boarding student. Our real life was in the dorms, study halls, schoolyards, and hallways, where we had to learn to stand on our own two feet, and had to get on with our lives without mom and dad. Boarding students discovered how heavy the existence of authority was, how cruel the oppression of the upper classmen could be, how mercilessly you had to compete to survive, and how slimy social relations could be—and we learned. Nobody cared in this world if you were taunted, sad, bullied or crying; the weak were meant to be tormented, they were destined to the loneliness.
Our school had its first graduates in the early 60s, and our older brothers used to tell us that the rules were more strict back then, and to be thankful. In those years when there were no girls admitted to the school, I could easily imagine how the boys set up a tough, cruel and loveless system. It was an inhuman thing for such a system to become tradition, where guys even one year ahead had authority over and the right to beat up the younger ones. The guys all took up what they went through themselves, and they took the torment they went through once out of the younger ones.
Toward the end of study period, we were still working on NGA and the surveillant chewed us out a little for the noise we were making, so we had to shut up. A bit later, study period was over and we poured out into the halls of upstairs and went into the rooms where we would sleep. One life was over, a new one was beginning.
Sometimes for a polar bear to survive, a fish in the river will sacrifice itself. In a way, living was like this. There was a perfect balance between death and survival.
In fact, there was no difference between matter turning to nothing, and matter coming from nothing.

4
THE DORM

During our childhood in the 60s, Istanbul was more of a livable city with fewer problems in the country in general. It seemed like we were poorer but happier. The year 1974 turned out to be a turning point in the fate of Turkey. The country was hit badly by economic breakdown that began with the embargoes after the Cyprus Peace Operation and became a real mess with the war expenses. Istanbul, this way, had entered a time of corruption, decline, and mass immigration from the villages to the metropolis.
A year before, the Bosphorus Bridge had opened in Istanbul. The bridge was the beginning of a new period for the boarders. The pleasure of the ferry boats was replaced by the Kadikoy mini-buses. Lots of boarders took the advantage of this new situation and changed over to being day students. Before the bridge, boarders of the whole school would come together on the 8:00 a.m. Karakoy ferry every Monday morning.
At those times, we would sit in the wonderful atmosphere of the ferry’s first-class lounge, order tea, and chat all the way. Our upperclassman brothers used to treat us pretty nice there. We would discuss the news in the papers, and the lowerclassmen were even given the right to talk freely to the seniors, provided they didn’t keep the same friendliness going at school. When the day-students and teachers vanished from the scene in the evenings and the time of sovereignty came in the study halls and dorms, the senior boarders turned into real monsters.
My bed was in dorm number thirteen, and head to head with Ayhan’s. After putting on our pajamas and doing some wresting-fighting stunts with the other bastards, we’d go back to our beds once the bed-time call horn was blown. Under the warnings of the surveillants, we’d finish up all the festivities consisting of urination, tooth-brushing, and foot-washing in the gigantic troughs of our lavatory, and then we’d be stuffed back into our dorms. They’d push in a few late coming idiots and close all the doors; everyone was supposed to be quiet and go to sleep. Then came in the whispery chatting… Who the hell went to sleep at 10:30 p.m. anyway, for God’s sake?
Sitting crossed-legged on his bed, Ayhan turned to me and asked in a lowered voice, “Anybody in the hallway? Who’s the teacher on duty tonight?”
Standing up on my bed, I peeked out from the upper windows that looked out into the hallway. “All is well,” I said. “Mr. Necdet’s on duty tonight. Relax, man. C’mon give me a cigarette.”
He held over the pack to me. “Okay, you get the bottle out,” he said. I pulled out the 70cc Dogkiller from under the bed in the blink of an eye. That year’s red was as good as any French wine, frankly speaking.  Although none of us had ever tasted any other kind other than that anyway.
Renan ran over from his bed on the other side. This bastard always had the habit of munching in on your stuff. “Hey, don’t forget your bro. Save a few swigs for me. There wouldn’t be any wine for you if it wasn’t for me.”
Ayhan was always generous, not just to members of Zorba, but to almost everyone. When necessary, though, he would teach Renan his lesson for being such a dog. “Man, we pay money for these goods. Your brother-in-law doesn’t hand out wine for free,” he said, roughly poking Oguz in the head. “Everybody bring a cup if you want to have some wine. Tonight we have straight up red. Where’s the corkscrew?”
What he called a corkscrew was a half broken nail clipper that was given to the Arab by the gang. As I mentioned before, a bottle of Dogkiller had no cork. When our noises got louder, our class rep Ziya started slightly grunting. Ziya was never in on this kind of stuff. A non-smoker and non-drinker, he was careful to do an enough amount of schoolwork to avoid being bothered by others. Our drinking, smoking and chatting until late hours made him uncomfortable, but he knew very well that the decent thing to do was to put up with it all.
With a poor, whiny voice, “Cut it off, you guys!” he just called out. “I’ve got orals tomorrow, you guys don’t have any mercy!”
Ayhan politely comforted him. “Alright man, we’ll notch it down a bit. You just close your ears and turn the other way. You won’t even know we’re here.” Then he threw one of his slippers to the Arab’s head. “Arab, give me that corkscrew over there. Put the slipper back in its place on your way,” he ordered.
Arab quickly got up to take the nail clipper from the hide place behind the radiator. He brought it to Ayhan. Usually, since we would chat for at least two hours before we went to sleep, we’d drink a little wine and smoke a few cigarettes in the meantime. Arab, who wouldn’t smoke, would sit in the cloud of smoke and sigh. He wasn’t allowed to say anything else.
Taking food, drink, newspapers, magazines, and other harmful materials into the dormitories was forbidden. For this reason, we would sneak stuff like cigarettes and alcohol in, the goods that weren’t even mentioned in the school regulations. The crime was the same crime, anyway, because the punishment was the same.
The favorite topics of our nighttime chats were girls and love. The events of the day would be talked over for hours, with endless and inexhaustible excitement. Tactics were hashed out, and everything that had to do with love and how it filled our little hearts was told and listened to.
Everyone in our dorm had a girlfriend. These love affairs weren’t like the ones you might know. The girls were not even aware of our love, or the way we would continuously think and talk about them. Oguz, who was deeply in love with the flirtiest girl in the class, repeated the same old story to Ziya every night.
“Oh, boy, I’ve got to get rid of this obsession. No way out…”
“So what did you do with your bird today? Everything went alright?”
Oguz’s face would fall and he would say; “No way man, she wouldn’t give me the time of the day. All she thinks about is that guy at Priest School, you know. That fucker is eighteen years old...” Miserably, he’d spread his arms out.
We used to call the French Lyceé next door the Priest School. Besides, as far as we were concerned, an eighteen-year-old guy was a sick old perve who could have been married with children and too old to be dating girls our age.
Renan would cut in with his usual bullshit, “Boy, let’s get some of our day guys to beat him up at noon tomorrow. I’m telling you, it’s the only way.”
Oguz would take him seriously. “If that priest had any fault I’d say let’s do it, mate. But God knows the boy probably doesn’t even have a clue who she is. And I would give my life for her. But no, there’s no justice in this world…”
We knew our way into everything -gambling, booze, acting tough, soccer, fighting, and any kind of manly thing- but when it came time for flirting with a girl, we just couldn’t manage. All of our babes were in love with other guys, some worshipped rock stars or they went out with good-looking upperclassmen. They didn’t even look at us.
To tell the truth these babes were pretty nicely grown. While we were barely growing facial hair, the girl with the smallest boobs was bigger than size 38.
While in the same age group, we looked like midgets by them.
The girl that I was in love with actually liked me -as a person, of course- but still she said she couldn’t give up that bum named Beco who lived in her neighborhood. On weekends, she used to ask me to take her to the disco just so she could meet Beco inside, and she needed me because they wouldn’t let juniors in unless they were a couple. She would go with him into dark corners and make out, while I had to sit at the bar with a gin and tonic, making small talk with the bartender and suffering in every way.
On one of those days when I was drunk enough to confess my love to her, she told me she was planning to marry Beco, and I angrily left the disco. On Monday during the first class break, she came up to me and apologized and held my hand for a few seconds. My heart wouldn’t stop pounding for the rest of the day.
That, to me, was what real love was…
For us, in a relationship love and sex were opposite things. We wouldn’t even dream of making love with the girls we were in love with. Any friend who would say something like that would be given a rough time and shushed. The women who adorned our sex fantasies were the ones who happened to be in Bazaar, the movie magazine of those years, where smutty pictures of all the whorish stars were featured. We hadn’t found any women other than these suitable for sex and we didn’t know how to do it either.
Oguz wouldn’t smoke in the dorm without reading Bazaar magazine, and before gluing together the most important pages, never to be opened again, he would want us see those magnificent women inside. “Oh man, what an amazing ass. Will ya look at this picture?”
Renan, as if he were an expert on women, never liked any of them. “Which part of her is amazing, man? Her hips are all covered with cellulite.”
Holding his magazine in his hands, “What’s cell-u-lite, mate?” Oguz asked naively.
“Something that happens to the legs and asses of women, all lumpy like an orange peel...”
Oguz was silent as he thought for a while. He looked at the picture again, then turned to Renan and said disdainfully, “Forget about the cellulite, boy, you’d give your body and soul to fuck her. You’re hating on it ‘cause you can’t have it.”
Renan farted with a sound somewhere between a scooter tailpipe and a steamboat horn as if to say, ‘Here’s my answer…’ Oguz began swearing at him and opened the window. Our gaze would follow the heavy fog of cigarette smoke that dispersed under the bluish fluorescent light.
As the final topic of our nightly chat for closure, the activities of the day would be reviewed. The members of the gang would pursue their own activities separately during the day. If there wasn’t any event or problem that involved all of us together, Ziya would straighten out everything concerning our class and solve the issues concerning class with great seriousness; Oguz  would continue organizing the gambling and trading goods necessary for the financing of the gang; Renan would carry on meaningless debates on literature with his group of day-student snobs, as well as set up our liquor-cigarette orders; Ayhan and I would hang around well-known upperclassmen and take notes on being Zorba, and other cool behavior and make plans. This is how we each had things to talk about at night.
But the most important topic to bring us together was soccer.
Lastly, we agreed to do morning workout for the soccer match we had on Friday. The day after tomorrow, we’d get up early and play, we should make note not to forget to tie our towels to our bed frames tomorrow night. A towel tied at the foot of the bed was a message to the surveillants on duty: “Wake me up at five o’clock.” We used to get up at the crack of dawn a lot, to study for exams, to play soccer, or to watch heavyweight boxing from America on black-and-white TV of the school. When there was live broadcast in the evening there, we could watch it at 5:00 in the morning.
Our favorites were Mohammed Ali’s championship fights. Ali ‘flew like a butterfly and stung like a bee.’ After every heavyweight game in America, we’d get fired up and arrange tournaments in the classroom that I surely wouldn’t call boxing. We used to tie sponge cushions to our fists and fight to the bitter end. By the end there would always be some nasty accident; someone’s nose would start bleeding, someone’s eyebrow would be busted open, or a tooth would be broken. But in spite of all this, we would never quit, there would always be more boxing and more bleeding.
We got tired and put a stop to the chat at midnight. Snoring sounds started being heard from where the beds where. At 6:30 in the morning, we would be woken up, only to go snooze on our chairs in the study room with puffy eyes, and we would beg to our surveillants-on-duty in the ice cold dormitories to let us stay in our warm beds just ten more minutes.
Like all the basic necessities of life, the value of sleep is never realized until you’re left without it.

5
THE CLASSROOM AND THE SMOKEHOUSE

At the early hours, when we had finished morning study hall and moved along to the cafeteria for breakfast, the day students would start pouring into school grounds. Morning classes were always boring for me; I could only get through them by snoozing. Until then, my grades had been good enough. I still got an accumulation of useless of encyclopedic knowledge from my elementary school years. I don’t know why, though, but whatever it was that had motivated me back then was now gone.
In literature class, there was that ol’ failatun-mefailun thing from Ottoman poetry. I was daydreaming about where we would go when we escaped from school. In the next class, English, we just horsed around. Our teacher Miss Serpil read us some examples from the compositions we’d written last Tuesday and made some comments on them. The one written by our studious classmate, who had the nickname Patton, due to looking like exactly to the actor George C. Scott from the movie ‘General Patton’, had us laughing like crazy.
“Your mate has described life from the viewpoint of a ticket seller in a movie theater. Let me read it to you…”
He had written about the ‘tragedy’ of the box office man’s monotonous life and his weariness -the depression of being stuck in a six square feet cell and even the impossibility of leaving to use the bathroom due to the lines of people he had to attend and wetting his pants because of it. In fact, Patton had written something serious and strong, using a sophisticated literary tone in English that was higher than our level of understanding. However, it hadn’t occurred to him that his earnestness and diligence would just seem funny to us.
During the noon break, after lunch, we went to the back yard and wandered around. The kids called us over to gamble, and we chatted as we headed over there. We used to arrange ‘secret sessions’ in the side yard where leftovers from cafeteria food and the rest of the garbage were kept, a secluded corner where two parallel historic walls both met a parapet on the seashore. A secret session was a meeting where one of the gang’s banditry projects would be hammered out, or it could be a gathering where we would provide a few suckers to gamble.
We weren’t in a condition to arrange roulette or card games here. We used to organize our own game played with coins on the ground, called gildir. For this game, two people put the same amount of coins in each jar and shook them. Then they would each call head and tails, turning the jars over to the ground. Heads or tails, whichever the player bet, he would pick up the coins he won and the balance went to house bank.
Every long break during the day, either the lunch break or before study hall, we would have a gildir session on behalf of Zorba. The organizer of this business was of course the gang’s hyperactive man; Jackpot Oguz. He got his nickname from the famous gambling man in the Lucky Luke cartoons. This game made the gang gildir millionaires. We got brand new sports clothes, shoes, and gear, all purchased with gambling income.
Back then, the word ‘sponsorship’ hadn’t been heard yet, and even if they had existed and we had applied to Adidas or Puma, do you think there would had been any possibility of supporting us, huh?
We heard Jackpot’s voice coming all the way from the seashore; “C’mon, Kremlin boy, you tell me, heads or tails?”
We scarcely heard Kremlin’s words, “I say heads,” with a sad mumble that showed he had lost his self confidence. When we got closer to the corner, we saw six or sever gamblers were gathered there in a circle. Jackpot shook the jar a couple times around his head with a fancy move, and turned it over onto the ground.
No one knew how he did it, but whichever the player bet, the player would always lose.
“Take your fifty kurush and go. New players! C’mon gentlemen, new game beginning. Pig, aren’t you playing?”
Almost every boy in school had a nickname, especially the boarders. Some of the names didn’t catch on and were forgotten after a while. But there were some nicknames that would even replace the actual name of the guy.
The name I got stuck with, strange enough was the ‘Nationalist.’ On my first year at the school during a discussion on the Vietnam War and the U.S. Army, I’d argued that the Turkish Army has always been strong —as history has shown. I’d said that the armed powers of the Middle East and Europe would not be able to handle us or invade our country. In my opinion, the reason for this came from our people’s warrior spirit and their power of resistance, rather than from equipment and guns.
Didn’t America’s defeat in Vietnam make this obvious?
I was an eleven year old kid, and the bigger kids in sixth grade laughed a lot at what I said and named me after it. It was undoubtedly a conflicting sight that a guy who’d adopted Godwin’s anarchist philosophy had such a nickname, but there was nothing I could do. Fighting against your nickname wouldn’t change it; in our school that kind of behavior made it stick even more. 
It took more than half an hour for Jackpot to fleece the folks in the gildir game: the losers left the game unsatisfied. Finally, though, lunch break was over. Kremlin, Pig, and the others abandoned their currency to the gang’s treasury and walked to class with heads hanging low. We totaled our revenue and took it to our hiding place. We used to keep count very carefully for these kinds of activities.
In the school discotheque, they used to play all the good hits from the American top lists during the lunch hour and all the lesson breaks. The white American teachers who came to our school were the reason for this; they came to work at out school as part of the ‘Peace Corps’. The Staples Singers had just released “City in the Sky” that year, and all the hottest songs from that album along with lots of other great songs were always blasting from the Radiopunch speakers in the halls, the cafeteria, and various places in the yard.
The lab classes, which were held in a specially built one-floor building right behind where the main building was, were always scheduled for the afternoon hours. The reason was not to be known. That particular day, during the first lesson of the afternoon, we were having some fun in the science lab. A group of serious students were preparing material necessary for the reproduction of bacteria to be observed under the microscope. They boiled a piece of meat in a saucepan over a cooker and distributed the broth into test tubes. Some of these were closed tightly, some were covered with a piece of cloth, and some were left open. We would then observe which one produced more bacteria next week on Monday.
Just when boredom and weariness were weighing down on us, the break bell rang. We wanted to go down to the smokehouse. Spring was in the air and the weather was getting warmer. Rather than enjoying our cigarettes in the john, we preferred to smoke them down in the open air.
In the smokehouse right behind the canteen, under the stairs was where our bullshit conversations took place. This was where you could hear the most unknown slang, and it was where you enjoyed telling dirty jokes to everybody and show off with sex stories that never really experienced. On rare occasions, girls from the upper classes would also come and smoke there, in which case the level of slang would be reduced a little.
The kids of the lowerclassmen who would try to talk to girls preferred to meet them in front of the canteen, right at the back of the smokehouse, and the girls used to show up to their first dates with their best friend. The beginning sessions of flirting in any case would be carried out in a group of three: the girl, the boy, and the other girl in the position of translator, and even the jump to the hand-holding phase could take several months. The first kiss, especially, would usually be delayed till the next season.
Only the day-students, who were the more civilized ones, actually had the guts to ask girls out. They dressed right, they combed their hair. We, the boarders, couldn’t associate with the girls. Even the best-looking guy among us looked ragged. Our pants weren’t ironed, our shoes weren’t polished, our hands were dirty, our teeth weren’t brushed, and our cleanest socks were worn for at least three days.
Under the circumstances, we just weren’t capable of looking after ourselves…
And we used to find more manly activities for ourselves; we’d play soccer, we’d do vagrancy, we’d smoke’n’drink, and we’d talk with lots of swearing. We didn’t like the guys who were too good with the girls. First we call him sissy, made fun of him publicly, and if he was still the same then we used to find ways to ruin him.
On the second break in the afternoon, while we were smoking at the smokehouse, I overheard the senior gang scheming secretly at the corner. There was a weird conversation going on. As far as I could tell, the senior group of guys who ran away from school and got caught by the guardians on their way back last month, were chasing a new adventure that was based on an urban legend... One of our senior brothers, nicknamed ‘Americano’ due to his double-striped American commando sergeant uniform, was enthusiastically explaining.
“Hey man, this tunnel’s got to open to the basement of the old building; Keg Mahir told me that it’s perfectly possible for that old historic building left over from the Carmelite nuns to have a secret passage in its basement that leads to the old pier. He says all the old monasteries had one.
Junkie, seeming uninterested, took a huge puff from his cigarette and whiffed a hard cloud of smoke towards Americano and Truck standing right beside him. “It’s probably bullshit,” he said.
Sami the Chickenfucker, who had the looks of a real Mexican bandit, cut off sternly.  “It’s no shit, man... Go and see it for yourself. End of the tunnel is at the cliff of the seashore, behind the tree... Truck, you’ve seen it, ain’t ya?”
From what I could tell, it was Truck who most interested in this topic. Turning towards Junkie, he came forward with his body which was as big as a dumper truck. Sending a huge ball of spit toward the tree not too far away, he talked with that bloodcurdling bass-toned voice. “There’s an old frame of brick plastered with cement around there, but I don’t know if it’s a tunnel exit. We’ve got to go there and dig it out.”
Americano’s interest in the tunnel was never constant, anyway, and he didn’t comment on Truck’s words. Junkie, without any words, slowly turned his giant neck both sides in his turtleneck sweater and cracked his knuckles. He was taller than six feet three and didn’t like to talk or argue; he only smoked.
“C’mon girls… That’s enough gossip for the day,” he said.
Sami gulped. Without showing that he was offended, he walked back to the building and vanished. Almost all the subjects were left unfinished like that with our senior brothers. The voltage was high, but there would be no shock; the ampere was low.
The bell rang and the fifteen minute break ended. We threw our cigarettes into to puddles on the floor to snuff them out, there were almost a hundred butts floating inside the mud. With a bit of a delay, we entered the classroom at the same time as the teacher. We still kept on talking when we were taking our seats.
“You heard the conversation, didn’t you?” I asked Ayhan.
He ignored my excitement. “So what if I did?” he shrugged.
“What do you mean so what?! Maybe we’ll discover a brand new way, and we’ll be the first users of that tunnel. What more can you ask for?”
We were beginning to get noticed by our teacher who had started doing the roll call. He finally shouted over at us. “Hey, you guys there… What are you two talking over there for? Don’t make me grab your ears and throw you out!”
As I mentioned before, due to this talent I had for easily passing my exams without studying or listening in class, the teachers had a soft spot for me and were sympathetic. The person who made me discover this about myself back in elementary school was my uncle, who had graduated from the Istanbul Technical University as an electrical engineer and set up an elevator company.
One morning in class, when I had played soccer and not done my homework, I’d put my palms up and waited to be punished with a slap on the hand with a ruler by my primary school teacher. I had no excuses… That smart woman teaching a class of seventy students, looked right in my eyes and, for some reason, didn’t slap my hands and but gave me another punishment instead: I would prepare for the next class subject and present it to the class the next day.
This was really a horrific punishment! Boy, I was only eight, not even circumcised, you know, what was this woman expecting of me? Was this not mercilessness?
To my luck or lack of, -maybe they’re the same thing- my uncle came over to dinner that evening. He explained and drew to me, in a perfect way that would make me understand, how an electric motor worked. I was the kind of boy who was unable to memorize or imitate anything, and besides I was deeply bored of monotonous exercises of repeat. In spite of this, I had the skill of grasping whatever I read in one take, and a memory that almost never forgets what it learns.
Next day I presented the subject, drawing diagrams and writing notes on the board, to everybody. That’s how the electric motor worked. Later on, in all my primary school years, instead of doing homework I did the same thing. I would talk in class about the subjects my teacher assigned me… My knowledge from the primary school years consisted of these; just like the education curriculum in our country, they weren’t things that would be of use in real life.
Around evening, we came to the end of another day. The last lesson was over; the day-pupils had gone back to their warm homes. For the boarders it was the same things all over again, same loneliness, same people... Around that time almost everything bored me, except for Ayhan I wasn’t even in the mood to see the members of our gang.
The pranks we pulled seemed childish and phony to me. Our lives were empty, and our world was very tiny. The vileness, jokes and soccer games were just little shows we put on; our chains would only allow that. We’ve never tasted real freedom, for that we had to have ‘real’ adventures.
Only the ones who live adventures would become men in this world, the rest was a big old nothing...

6
THE IDEA

Together with Ayhan, we were working on NGA again all through the evening study.  Bunged up, there was not a single idea on our minds. Ayhan told me that we have to read more MAD fascicles to find subjects. My mind was in somewhere else; in order to develop our scope and authorship we should see brand new worlds. Art was something that’s feed with adventure. The most necessary thing to be tough guys was that; there can’t be life without experience.
I remembered Jack London, the favorite guy of my childhood. While reading his books kneaded with his own life, I used to dress myself in his character, and become him. In my dreams I used to take on plenty of missions; fight with the wolves in icy Alaska nights, start fires not to get frozen, become a pirate in Pacific, and run away from cannibals on the islands...
“Let’s escape from the school on Thursday night and go somewhere.  What d’you say?  So damn bored here,” I said abruptly to Ayhan.
The boy’s amazed. “Are you nuts?” he scolded me. “Why the hell would we escape, boy? Have ya ever thought how we’ll come back? Don’t forget that nowadays the management bags almost all of the runaways. They don’t allow even a bird fly.”
Because I haven’t beaten any brain on the subject yet enough, I didn’t say much. “There are so many guys who have escaped and come back all safe and sound.  We can do it, too, what’s that you worry?” I just mumbled.
“You’re really nuts. We know the tricks, boy. We’ve as well seen how many caught and beaten, and even kicked off the school.”
“Look, what I say is that if we manage this tunnel thing, we can do it milk run, boy.” I handed the dirty beige binded book towards him. “I took this book from the library; it’s about the history of our school. There are even the sketches of the old building,” I said.
Ayhan grabbed that French document from my hand and threw it into the drawer of the desk. “Even if there is a tunnel this would not be any use for us neither would it solve our problem,” he said roughly. “The opening along the seashore’s closed by cement. And anyway, it may not be a tunnel end, but a window on the wall.”
I turned sour. “No, I’m sure it is a passage,” I murmured with a forced obstinacy.
“Let’s assume that there’s the exit of the tunnel there… How can we break the cement without a compressor? Even if there is, how would we dig it without any noise? It ain’t a job for us,” he said soon after.
I was disappointed on what he said, I picked up the notebook in front of me, and pass to the desk behind while I kept on grumbling. “You’ll see when I manage it...”
Fifteen minutes later he came by me and propitiated. He’d drawn two cartoons for NGA.  Both of them were funny enough to make the lads laugh. Ayhan said that he was not against the idea of escaping; he simply thought that we needed to think over it once more. I tried to explain him.  We would live an adventure; get inspired, write more interesting things at the magazine, and then we’d raise NGA’s price to twenty.
Yet because he’s afraid to get in trouble, he was still unwilling. “Boy, it’s not an easy thing; even the sixth graders can’t do this so easily,” he whispered. “You know, last month the Trunk and his lots have broken to the beerhouse right from the infirmary. They got caught by the guard. Not only smacked twenty by the vice principal, they were almost dismissed from the school. Disgraced to everybody as well…  It’s easy to go out, but y’know it’s difficult to come in.”
“If ‘we’ escape, we will come back all safe and sound, don’t worry,” I told him.
“Why wouldn’t anything happen to us?” he asked surprised.
I grinned with a cunning expression on my face. “Because I‘m going to make a perfect plan. That’ll be our difference from them; the power of brain…”
He paused looking at me. “Really, will you create a miracle?”
I was pissed off about his attitude, as well. I reminded him how good I was in this kind of things, giving him a few examples of the previous works of the gang. If worse comes to worst, like the seniors do, we would just climb on the back garden wall and jump in. I asked him what was so hard about it; any runaway boarder would tend to get into the backyard always like this anyway.
“Let’s say we jumped in from the garden wall, then how would we get into the building?” he said with a nervous tone. “Y’know there is two guards in the landings of the left and right hallways.  All the stairs end up there. We’ve already talked about this issue; we came to the same point and got stuck in again. The older lads do this when they manage to bribe the guards. Otherwise...”
He acted cutthroat. He was right, the result of being caught was worse than death. I was waiting for him to tell me all this, though; burst out the suggestion right away. “Who told you that we’ll be back at night?” I asked full confidently. “There are no guards at the school in the early morning, if we climb to the rear wall and jump in; we directly go to the study... Who’s gonna stop us?” I winked.
It seemed to me that Ayhan’s appreciated my idea. I’ve got this feeling from his shining eyes. “Okay, did you ever think about where and with which money shall we go and stay till dawn?” he asked.
Well actually I hadn’t given a thought about the details yet, but I was passionate to have an adventure like this. I told him that it wouldn’t be a problem to plan a perfect escape and journey. “The gang’s cash is almost enough for the expenses. We surely can sort out the rest. What d’ ya say?”
I looked at his face waiting for an answer. He turned his eyes away from me, and took the pen in his hand again. He seemed as if he was confused. “Okay then, think all about these and I’ll finish the magazine,” he said.
When he turned back to write and read, I passed to the rear desk again and started thinking about the escape plan. I was noting down the possible obstacles we may face. When the bell rang, and it was time for ‘go upstairs and put the pijays on’, I’d already written down quite a lot.
I got into the shithouse that’s forever-smelled shit, full of giant fountains with millions of drinking basins and urinals. Brushed my teeth and washed my face neatly for a change…
There were subjects more important than the girls that night. While the other lads continued their usual chat, I gave Ayhan a speech about how empty and boring our lives were. “We’re so badly stuck into this jail; don’t see a thing of the outside world. We even watch TV once a week in the evening.”
He’s got that I was trying to convince him about the escape. Smiling, he asked me to come to the point. “This is the last time I’m asking you; let’s go out of here on Thursday evening and go somewhere,” I kept on very solemnly. “Otherwise I’ll do it by myself...”
I was utterly surprised when he said, “Okay, tell me where we shall go?” He seemed as he’s given up resisting as he’s done in the evening. “We can go to the movie, or to the teahouse for example...” I said excitedly.
There was a moment of silence. Ayhan said that he couldn’t understand the movies or teahouse part of this adventure. Weren’t we out to explore the outer world?  We sure should do something different.
“You’re right,” I said to him. “We need to go to other places. To say the truth, I made the plan like that, but I just couldn’t dare to tell ya…”
We hugged each other, laughed and laughed. Punks in bed got surprised, joined us without understanding anything.
We should go somewhere that’s open and vivid till morning. First I thought of wandering the night clubs and whorehouses in Beyoglu like our senior fellows do, but it was boringly classical, and they may not let the juniors in. To booze-up at the beerhouses in Kadikoy was not a thing to do all night long. It was illogical to do an out-of-city route; our time was limited and we should be back at school on the next morning.
Then I thought of day and night busy places like the bus terminals, railway stations or quays. Active and full of energy… We should go somewhere like this.
An aim of business, meeting someone or dining somewhere would turn this escape into a more impressive adventure. Many more ideas came to my mind; like climbing the cypress trees behind to peep inside the houses, or to eat Iskender kebab in Bursa...
At the end, I made a disastrous plan; we’d play three-ball pool at the teahouse by the sea at Moda cape, booze-up at the most famous beerhouse in Kadikoy quay, and after a ferry trip to Yalova harbor, we’d have a tremendous post-dinner with tripe soup, sheep-head and intestines. And at the dawn we’d get back to school. This would be a unique adventure with three locations; since timing of the road map should be flawless, we should learn the train and ferry schedules, and how to reach them.
I thought of devilish escape plans, dreamed about it almost all night long. I fell asleep wearily at last while thinking what to ask to whom…
Woke up early in the morning, I got into the study without even washing my face. There was a strange excitement inside me. The lessons I always passed somehow seemed to be troubled to me now, I was worried to fail at the last exams.
I could manage to do the morning written hardly. I kept talking about our escape plan with Ayhan during the lessons and breaks.
“You say the starters of Olimpiyat are delicious? What time we should leave there?”
“I didn’t figure it out yet but should be around midnight...”
“And the train schedule?”
“I’ve got it. And the ferry timetable as well... Soon I’ll do the fine tuning.”
We shouldn’t do anything wrong especially at the entrance and exit. We would be in deep shit if caught. We decided to go out from the wall at the backyard. We would pass down to the other side with the help of a forty feet long rope, and follow the path with a torch in the darkness. And then there began the grass.
That high stone wall crossing the backyard had more meaning than the Wall of Berlin to me. That wall was the main obstacle of the freedom at the outer world; it was the wall of shame…
Some nights I dreamt of jumping over this fifteen feet high wall with great difficulty, and ran on the vastly wide prairies. Reunite with the loved ones, embrace them and reach the shores of the turquoise seas, sail to some new horizons.
I always hate the authority because it puts the bans in… The prohibitions need not necessarily reasonable, and even if they had, the discomfort of its application would be more harmful then its benefit.
But still, the authorities insist upon the rules.
Throughout the history, we were conditioned to obey the restrictions, rules, sins and regulations that were dictated by the leaders, prophets, kings and sultans. Now we are born with the codes of being controlled and ruled. Even with the tiniest group of people we’d choose a leader for ourselves. And the leader would immediately draw the borders that soon would lead to trouble, and we’d love and cheer it.
My dream was world of freedom without borders and authority. Neither wanted to rule anybody nor to be inhibited… I adored the system of wild animals living in the forest; spontaneous and natural... This was as impossible as the Utopia of Thomas More, but I still loved to daydream; just a kid I was.
Just when I was about to fall asleep, at the last moment, I remembered to tie a towel to the rod of the bed; we got to play soccer in the morning. It was the most important thing in the world, of course. At least for us…
We’d nothing to do with people who didn’t like soccer.

7
SOCCER TIME

Waken up at six in the morning, we put on our sky-blue sportsgears and went down to the soccer field. Even if the field seemed huge to our eyes, in fact, it was smaller than the half of a standard soccer field. For that reason, our teams had seven players each.
Three days later, on Saturday morning, we had middle section championship match; we’d show class 3-C who’s the boss. We really were a good team. On the other hand, we were aware of the outer soccer world; keeping up with the domestic league as well as the world cup. We even all had notebooks in which we noted all the scores of the games in charts. It was an obsession…
As someone who has no interest in soccer today, I remember those days with a strange nostalgia.
We used to play soccer everyday in the streets of Nishantashi, where my childhood was spent. And what games they were... We would start at the dawn of the morning, in front of our houses. It was impossibly rare that a car would drive by through our cobblestone floored street. Almost no traffic at all... For this reason, those wonderful cobblestones were never ruined. When the stones needed any repair, the repairman would come to hammer them into their places, like a wizard; all in its pattern.
Back then the street were safe. We didn’t know of pre-school or nurseries. Prior to primary school, all children would spend their time in the streets; playing games in vacant grounds of ruinous buildings, and dash into fruit gardens you could find in any district of Istanbul. Trees had enough fruit on them to feed all the children in every season. The girls used to play in the streets, too. Even the most sophisticated, ‘socialite’ girls would come out to play, only for elegant games like hopscotch, burning ball and en-de-trois prettiness… We, as tough boys, never played those kinds of games; all we thought about was soccer.
Last semi-final game, we’d beaten class 3-A fair and square. This was our victory; we’ve jumped with joy, and the girls in our class smothered us with kisses. The losers couldn’t stand the defeat and their audience cursed at out goalie, tried to bully us, and it spun out of control. Mickey Tugrul parted us and broke up the fight. He’d silenced us instantly.
Mickey, our sweet punk of a brother who was a senior, was our god. We all wanted to be like him and speak the way he did. He was a kind of guy who wouldn’t causelessly bully the youngsters and he would watch over and be fond of them. He was one of the most ferocious gamblers of the tea-house. The gang’s been always on good terms with him; because just by looking into one’s eyes he could recognize the quality of a real bummer.
“Hey there, come over here!” He yelled for us from the road in front of the new building.
Except Oguz , who was absent from being at a secret session, we all ran along and in front of him. We had our sweat suits on. Ayhan had the ball. As usual, I was the spokesperson of the gang. Mickey, swinging his black paternoster, was drinking his tea. He was seated on the yard parapet.
“Say the word, captain Tugrul!” I said.
It was forbidden for us to call our senior brothers by their nicknames. Sliding to the side of the parapet a little, Mickey gestured at us to make ourselves comfortable. “How do you do?” he asked, thrusting out his hand.
I shook it, and having been caught unprepared, gave the wrong answer by saying, ”We’re fine, commander Tugrul!”
From where he sat, he gave me a smack right beside my ear. The guys were horrified by the loudness of the sound, though it didn’t hurt much. He had this special technique when he slapped someone; there came out a big sound but it wouldn’t hurt.
“How many times do I have to tell you, bastards; you should say I’m fine not we’re fine... Answer only for yourself... And you don’t shake someone’s hand like a sissy. Shake hands properly, like a real man. You got it?!” he shouted at my ear.
“Understood, captain Tugrul!” I said promptly. What else could I say?
I gave a sharp reply looking right into his eyes, instantly and loud. He used to get annoyed with that kind of stuff too; he was such a strange guy...
“What are you up to right now, tell me,” he said looking around. “Where’s Jackpot?”
He knew all of us very well and used to keep tabs on us.
“There’s a gildir session right beside the wall...” I answered him, pointing with my finger.
“So you make good money from that biz, huh?”
“No captain, the markets are flat at the moment; nobody’s got any money,” I rushed. “Y’know; it’s March, the month of scourge.”
We could never tell anybody that we made helluva money from gambling; otherwise they would shake us down and try to get their ‘share’ of it all our lives.
Mickey turned towards Ziya, “Hey, you keep charge of the official biz fine, don’t ya?” He knew that Ziya was rep of the classroom.
“I do, cap’n Tugrul, they don’t even have one warning letter. Even when they skip class, I write it in like they’re present at the roll call,” Ziya stuttered.
Mickey used to show us the way of such things; the school procedures and how to get around them, ways in how to handle problems. Somehow, he had the school management eating from the palm of his hand. When he finished his conversation with Ziya, this time, he turned towards Renan and caressed him with a slap.
“Don’t hang around with this Renan rascal, ya bastards; this guy ain’t no useful for shit. He’s not even wearing his sportsuit. What does he do, for example?” he asked in a raging tone.
“He does no shit, captain. Just sneaks our alcohol and cigarettes in to the school,” I answered.
“He doesn’t play ball?”
As team captain, Ayhan answered. “We don’t let him play, captain.”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about, boy. Don’t let these boys, not yet real men, join your group!...”
“Understood, cap’n Tugrul… We’ll make him a real man, don’t worry. From tomorrow on, we’ll get him to join all the soccer workouts. And also we’ll get him new glasses,” I told him in a rush.
“Alright, then… Get lost now!”
He straightened up, slightly pushing us away with his arm, and started showing interest to the girl passing by. We got lost without lingering. It was no use forcing our luck; we could easily spill something we shouldn’t have and lose our most important supporter. Mickey didn’t like and wouldn’t defend younger boys who weren’t real gangsters.
He’d figured out what kind of bums we are, from the first day that we started school.

8
THE PLAN TO ESCAPE

We couldn’t decide how to get back into the school building when we return from our adventure. Our pockets were going to be filled with empty soda bottles, so Ayhan’s idea was to enter through the front gate by blending in with the day-students instead of using the backyard wall. I thought this was a dangerous option; the Spy factor was daunting me.
There was the Spy at the gate; it wasn’t easy to pet past him. This old guard at the main gate of the school building knew the names and faces of everybody who was registered at the school, and he inspected the ins and outs every morning and evening. He had the kind of visual memory that  even remembered the guys who have graduated years ago. Maybe it was because he was a real spy, nobody knew his real name. He was originally from the Black Sea region, gimp with a moustache, a witty personality and a sense of humor. He was liked by the day-students, and almost hated by the boarders who were keen to cause trouble. Whenever he caught a troublemaker, he would catch him by the ears and lead to the vice principal’s room.
It was tough to be dressed in disguise as a day-pupil going back into the school past him, because the Spy knew who was a boarder and who was a day-student.  Maybe if we were lucky, we could sneak past him dressed like the day-students with our navy blue jacket-tie combination and carrying books. We were all aware of the successful runaways that were accomplished using this tactic, but it was very risky; once you were busted there was no way back.
Besides this, selling stolen soda bottles to Canteen Kemal was a job that needed skill too; he usually figured it out pretty quickly. Being the strict tradesman he was, figuring out ways to make more money and inventing special devices to help him slice the cheese he would put in our toast so thin the slices were transparent, he would see the pile of empty soda bottles of ours and matching guilty expressions on our faces and figure out the situation. He would probably offer us half of the market price. For this reason, we had to get at least twenty bottles and sneak them inside without breaking them. They would barely cover our travel expenses if we sold them for half the price.
When Ayhan heard about this part of the organization, he objected to say that this was thievery and that it didn’t matter whether it was a small or a big crime. I wasn’t expecting this sort of attitude from him.
I had to start arguing his point, so we could get past this. “You can’t be that dumb to call this collect-and-sell bottle deal thievery,” I told him. “Even if it was, most people who steal do it out of desperation and obligation; because they’d be starving if they didn’t. Not because it’s a smooth ride or anything… The real thieves are the greedy people who have hunger for more.”
I was the kind of guy who was known for passionately defending my arguments in class debates. Ayhan had a mocking smile on his face now. “So in your opinion, what we’re gonna do is not thievery or anything, is that right?” he said.
“Of course it’s not, boy,” I said with perfect confidence. “We are just going to nick a few coke bottles that worthless to everyone else, and we’ll do this due to being broke and desperate, for an honorable cause. The most important thing is we’ll do this without harming anybody. That’s all there is to it…”
He was confused. Kept quiet for a while, then thought about it and decided that I was right. I explained to him that why we couldn’t not take the risk of entering from the main gate. We would have get in the same way we got out, and that was by climbing the rear wall. With ten soda bottles on each of us, this would be a hard thing to do.
It was supposed to be so…
As a result, the harder this adventure pushed us, the greater our pleasure would be... We were reaching out to the outer world; we would gain fame as great voyagers in our own caliber, we’d travel to other places to live other adventures. From there on, nobody could stop us...
When we told them at the smokehouse, even the adventurous sixth graders would be impressed. ‘Whoa,’ they would say, ‘the kids got balls’. The respect we got would be so substantial; we would be known as real gangsters, not a couple of rookies like now.
This adventure was the most important test in this school for us. We had to have success, and we would. Later on, we would cook up other adventures, improve our technique, and become the kings of this school. The girls would worship us... The teachers would hear about our fame, afraid of us, and they would favor us in all of our classes.
This whole thing was going to be so incredible, it really was...

9
THE ESCAPE

After a flood of depressing classes, Thursday’s class schedule was over. Non-boarding students rushed home with a loud rumble. I and Ayhan were making the final touches on the road map of our operation starting that night. We were very excited. The rest of the gang has realized we were up to something and were trying to get us to spill. At last, we told them that we had some ‘sneaky business’ to take care of; they had us covered in our absence.
Sneaky business was a very complex term meant for our obscure private life, gambling, sexual needs and love. It included to define such keen details that nobody dared to ask what it really meant.
Ziya, with his customary feeling of responsibility, tried to find out the minimum amount of information that he may need to have our backs in case a potential unpleasantness happened. “What kind of a sneaky biz is that?”
Ayhan satisfied his curiosity. “We’re taking a visit to see our chicks, boy, shh, you know?” he said.
Ziya’s got angry. “Hey, don’t joke with me,” he scolded Ayhan.
I interfered. “Look Ziya, You know the girls from Moda...”
“Yeah?” He didn’t get how that was related to the escape.
“If anybody asks, tell them we’re going to meet these girls and go to the movies,” I winked at him. I gestured for the gang members to come closer then. They formed a circle around me. “Just know that because of the night-guards we’re going to have to hang out at the teahouse ‘till the morning and sneak in before breakfast. Don’t forget to put ‘bodies’ under our bed covers,” I whispered.
Ziya got the message, he approved with a nod. “What’s the real story?” he asked.
“It’s better that we don’t tell you. If you know nothing, you’ll say nothing if they grill you. Understood?”
“Understood,” the gang replied altogether.
We told Ziya not to panic and to find a way to cover for us if we somehow couldn’t show up in the morning or if anything were to happen.
Just in case…
We couldn’t even eat anything at dinner out of excitement. We re-checked the detail plans of the big escape at least five times. It was almost time for the escape, and we were ready for it.
During the first study period, we were interrogated and forced to spill by our curious cats of gang members again.. This time Ziya interfered and comforted them. “Leave the guys alone; maybe they’re on the way to see their girls, or a whorehouse... Why do you ask so much? Just let them get it done, they’ll tell us everything in the morning, won’tcha?”
“Yeah, of course...”
“And they’ll all be published in NGA anyway...”
“Oh yeah!...”
The guys of the gang stopped bothering us and started laughing among themselves. Oguz skipped over to the classroom next to us to sell the latest magazine issue. Right before the second study period, while all the doggie boys were running down to the cafeteria in a big ball of rumble, we sneaked out down to the backyard. We were fully equipped. At the seaside, we tied one end of the rope, which we had previously hidden inside the cement box, to the foot of the stirrer junk that’s been left there since the construction of the new school building. We swung the other end of rope right across the other side of the wall. Stepping on the knots, we climbed down from the wall onto the ground. We left the rope there; we would need it on the way back.
Ayhan, leading the way with a torch, and me behind him, we walked along the steep cliff to the Priest’s Meadow. We almost fell and tumbled over a few times, because we couldn’t see the ground we stepped on properly. Furious stray dogs usually wandered around that meadow. One of the things we most feared of was to be attacked by them. We didn’t have anything to defend ourselves with other than the light coming out of our torch. Ayhan had filled his pockets with big pebble stones he picked up from the ground and he also relied on to the kicks he would throw with his heavy military boots. If we could see the dogs in this dark, then why not?
It took fifteen minutes to walk the meadow from one edge to the other. We saw two grey dogs approaching without a sound as we could see the lights of the teagarden on the other side, making shadows on the trees in the dark. The dogs gave up on us after we ran and jumped over the fence of the garden. They had to contend to bark and growl. We talked and laughed about how lucky we were to get through this tough barrier right in the beginning of our journey.
It was around nine. We arrived at the cape where the tea garden was. First, we talked and drank a bit of tea inside. Then we played some pool for about forty minutes. I was defeated, as usual. As I paid the bill and we left, he thought to ask me how I handled the money business. He wasn’t interested in the financial side of things and usually let me handle it.
“We’ve got enough money for everything. We can sip two bears each at the pub; have some clams and beer nuts. Anything extra is out of the budget” I said.
It was more than enough for Ayhan. He licked his lips and gulped. “How much time do we have there?” he asked.
With the attitude of an expert, “We have until eleven thirty,” I answered him. “Then we’ll take the 12:00 train from the Sogutlucheshme.”
“That’s more than enough; any more time spent at the beerhouse will be boring… Did you empty all of the cash?”
“Yes, there were more than twenty liras there, but it won’t cover the whole night. That’s why I borrowed ten more,” I said. “We’ll handle our debt with the bottles we’ll sneak in.”
“Who did you borrow it from?”
“Take it and ask no questions…”
I’ve lied to Ayhan. Not only did the soda bottles we’d sneak in would not cover the money I borrowed from the only loan shark of the school, the Chickenfucker, I also haven’t figured out how we would pay back the loan yet.
The best was to think of everything when time came, it was too early to think about all this…

10
INTO THE JOURNEY

Most people know that Kadikoy was a quay that held plenty of old and new pubs then. We plunged into the most famous beerhouse full of cigarette smoke inside, and ordered two beers right away. There was a well known, weepy a-la-Turca record playing: ‘Give Me Some Consolation’. All the customers inside were already pretty tipsy. It was a nice place with cheap beers, a place in which you could stand side by side with the drunkards and have some companionship. Ayhan was cheerfully looking around when some guy at the next table asked something about the horse races. We told him we knew nothing about the hacks.
“Did you order clams?”
“I got it covered. I ordered some beer nuts, too.”
The goods came within a minute. We said ‘cheers’ clinking our glasses and slurped down the foamy beers. We were devouring some hot peanuts and almonds, too.
A-ahh, what more could anyone want from life?
In forty minutes, we were smashed from slurping down the two big beers; we were walking like a couple of crabs while going to the bathroom. I looked at my watch and told Ayhan we needed to get going towards Sogutlucheshme. We had a long way to go; we would walk to the railway station to take the train to the ferry landing at Kartal, then to the shore. The roads of this journey were a joy ride for us. We were constantly commenting on the people we ran into, the trees, the roads, the buildings and everything we could set our eyes on as we went by.
Our train journey was pleasant. Catching the Yalova ferryboat just on time, we bought out tickets and got on the boat along with the truck drivers and the sellers while watching people around us. It seemed like there really was no one else but these people the boat at these late hours of the day. We quickly went up to the salon upstairs to have a smoke, which would help us look older and hide our timid glances. Fifteen minutes into the boat’s departure, most of the truckers had curled up on the wooden benches to take a nap.
The truck driver sleeping on the bench right in front us had to be seeing an erotic dream as he had his hand under his pants. The crutch of his pants had gotten sticky at the end. We were curled up in our chairs, chain-smoking our cigarettes away. After all, we were a couple of unprotected and innocent boys; we could easily be victims of a horny bastard in this cruel world.
About an hour later, we went outside to watch the boat getting closer to the quay. We stood there in the dry cold, under the stars, where it was cold but enjoyable. Ayhan’s eyes were shining with the hype of the journey.
“Hey boy,” I told him, playfully punching his shoulder. “No worries; we’ve already completed almost one-third of the mission.”
He said nothing. I couldn’t help but ask him what he was thinking as he seemed to be deep in thought. He avoided my question and smiled. Upon my insistence, he talked for a bit about his worries for the future.
Then he turned to me and asked, “What to you plan to do in the future?
I laughed at this; it was almost like the classic, cliché “what do you want to be when you grow up?” question. He took my reaction in, and asked if I was thinking of a particular profession. I told him I found it meaningless to plan the future when it was this early. Life was a long road with a foggy end; I would go wherever it took me…
Ayhan’s mother and uncle were both doctors, so I assumed he would want to be one as well.
I was wrong.
“I want to find a job that only a few people in this world do, a job that is dangerous but useful for the public,” he said.
I found this strange. “What would that be…a policeman or something?”
In fact, I was a mocking him a little bit. He couldn’t tell because he wasn’t looking at my face. “See, I don’t know. It could be a number of things, like a bomb specialist or private investigator…” he kept on.
Now, that really turned me on to tease him. “You want somebody’s wife to come up to you and say 'oh detective, I need to know if my husband’s cheating on me, and by the way, oh my, aren’t you so mysterious and handsome’. Right?”
“Don’t joke about this!” he snarled. "I don’t want to be an engineer or a lawyer like everybody else, that’s all…”
“What about medicine? Didn’t your family want you to be a doctor? Being a doctor doesn’t fit your dreams, does it, though? It’s a common profession now.”
“It was the most sensible choice for the future I thought for myself, actually. I see you look down on to the physicians, then…”
“Exactly,” I answered wisely. “My uncle says that even though medicine is one of the oldest professions in the world, it’s held back due to faulty education. If medical engineering weren’t so evolved and developed, these guys would totally flunk. All the world’s money is being spent on all the medicinal research that’s being done, and the results are still unsatisfactory. You see, they still haven’t found a cure for cancer.”
“Well, it’s easy for you to say these things. Boy, everything else in this world is degenerating, so who’s to say medicine won’t. Even if cancer was cured, there’ll always be other fatal illnesses…”
“There already are. I heard there’s this horrible disease spreading through the gays in America. It’s a virus attacking the immunity system and it doesn’t even have a name yet.”
We truly weren’t aware what AIDS was back then. Years later, we would hear of it as a commonly spreading sinister curse…
“Yeah, I heard. Anyway, when the time comes, and if I feel like I’m talented enough, I’d still like to be a doctor. What else is there to do but serve humanity in this world?”
“Ah, boy, not for me… I wouldn’t want to be a doctor. Definitely not…” I said to him.
“Why not?”
I tried to explain why not. In fact, I was trying to convince him. If he were to finish school and go off to study medicine, I was afraid that Ayhan and I would grow apart. He was a friend I never wanted to separate from. We were together and we would be together.
“There was this son of a family friend studying medicine. The guy was studying anatomy right from his first term; you should have seen the book he had for it. I’d never want to see it again.”
“Why is that?”
“Studying anatomy dulls a man’s streak of creativity, it kills his sexual appetite. The book was as thick as at least three bricks, boy…”
For some reason, he wasn’t laughing at my jokes. “You know how to crack those jokes, don’tcha. If you ask me, you should be a comedian. It’s up to you, though…” he said with a serious expression.
I wanted to act like I was offended, but I couldn’t bother. Then we both laughed like we’re crazy. The tension between us was gone. A guy selling hot tea was walking past us; we took one each and drank. All the empty coke and soda bottles from the buffet were left outside. We talked of how we would swipe away those bottles on the way back. It would be easy, the bottles were so conveniently and casually ‘thrown away’ just like that…
The one, who doesn’t take any measure, was always bound to have their property swiped away. No thief had any fault in that.

11
YALOVA QUAY

The boat was slowly reaching the shore. Lights around the quay grew bigger by the minute. We walked downstairs as we kept chatting. The wind was fairly strong; blowing away our hair, buzzing in our ears: we were having a hard time hearing each other. The Yalova quay was quite hectic. We could see the open restaurants lined by the Square. Ayhan pointed his finger towards where we would go.
We got off the ferryboat and walked past the peddlers around, chatting, while heading towards the main street at the end of the Square. His goals about the future had me thinking too. I told him about my wish to study something about art. It was hard for a young man in this country to make a university, or even a job choice.
“An artist in Turkey will suffer, man. Don’t you know that?” he said.
“As if you don’t suffer doing any other job… See if you’re a private detective or a bomb specialist. Your life will be at stake, and at the same time you’ll have to struggle like hell to make a living and get through the day.”
We found the restaurants on the main street to be unsympathetic and were drawn back by the fact that they might be overly priced. A ‘giblets eatery’ on one of the cross streets seemed like just the place we were looking for. We dived in. It wasn’t as narrow and cramped on the inside as it seemed; there were about ten tables. There were only a few people eating, given the late hour. A fat man who seemed to be the owner was serving. It was two in the morning, the next day’s program blazing through the radio; it was as if the world was asleep.
We ordered tripe soup. To top it, Ayhan, disregarding the fact that we had little money, ordered a lamb intestine for himself. The waiter hollered our order at the cook inside, in a language we didn’t understand; which we laughed at cheerfully among ourselves.
We had only spooned up our soups twice, when a tall, pale man in black reached our table. “Good evening, boys, may I sit? He said with an uncanny smile on his face. We barely muttered a ‘good evening.’ He plopped down on a chair he found without waiting for a reply.
“So, young men, how’s it going, huh? Where are you coming from?”
‘How the hell does this man know we’re passengers?’ I thought for a second. Half-heartedly, “From Istanbul…” I answered him.
“Are you students there?”
I slowly took another spoonful from my soup, keeping quiet. I wanted him to realize we didn’t want him there. Nevertheless, he responded to our silence, insisting on his question. “Are you?”
He didn’t care about bothering us. On the contrary, when I glanced at him with the corner of my eye, he had a bizarre smirk on his face; examining us with narrowed and bloody eyes, almost as if he would bite us with his sharp yellow teeth behind those purple lips. The tone of his voice changed when he had to ask third time. “What are you doing here at this hour?”
We hadn’t done anything to be interrogated. Ayhan shot out his answer in a deadpan voice. “We were hungry, and here we are drinking our soup… Is that bothering you?”
The man ignored his attitude. “Why did you come here and who are you looking for? That’s the question you fellas need to answer…” he said.
Ayhan’s got irritated, shaking his spoon in the man’s face while snarling.
“That is none of your business! Besides, we surely don’t have to explain ours…” I cut in. “We came here to my uncle’s, he’s from Yalova!” interrupting Ayhan.
The man turned to me then, “Is that so? Who’s that uncle of yours?” he said.
“Hikmet Kartal,” I quickly shot back. “Lives on Republic Avenue, number seventeen… “
Ayhan was grunting at my attempt to cool the water and ease the tension. I figured, every place must have a Republic Avenue. The man hesitated for a moment to think of said avenue.
“Don’t know him. You sure he lives in Yalova?”
I gulped and swallowed another spoon of my soup. I could sense what was about to come, and it couldn’t be good.
He turned to Ayhan that time, and pointed at the military flashlight hanging from his belt. “What the hell is that flashlight doing there?” he asked.
Ayhan had skipped on to eating his meat at that moment. “Why do you ask? Is it a crime to carry a flashlight and eat in a restaurant at night?” He questioned, trying to be cool.
The man stared at him with glassy eyes. His lips had formed a mocking smirk. “Depends on what you use that flashlight for…”
Ayhan asked without lifting his head. “Are you a cop?
Instead of answering, “If you don’t explain this flashlight to me, you’ll spend the night behind bars,” he threatened us.
I jumped in; “Me and my cousin, we come from Istanbul, from Maltepe. We come here once a month to visit my uncle. See, where we come from, the electric substation blew up… No electricity, on the streets or anywhere else, we didn’t want to fall…” I collated the stories that I made up in my mind.
The man interrupted me by putting his hands up in the air. “Quit telling me tales. I know damn well what sort of boys you are,” he said more roughly.
There was another silence. I was trying to calm myself down by lighting a smoke when I heard Ayhan’s icy voice. “Look, we ran away from school, okay?”
Preparing himself for a fight, he surely thought he shouldn’t need to lie. He turned his frame fully towards the man. “Yes, so, is there a problem with that?!”
The expression on the man’s face didn’t change at all; he was gazing into his eyes, tempting him to tell more.
“Is this a crime? We ran away and used a light to keep from falling in the dark, alright?” Ayhan kept on.
He wasn’t a cop, I could tell. I had a hunch that things would go wrong. Almost like a lawyer, he slowly spoke his words to Ayhan. “That’s what I guessed. Running away is a crime, surely. Besides, what’s even a bigger crime is running away from home and school this late at night, to steal in another area.”
Ayhan jumped up from his seat at this. He started shouting as flames of fire danced in his angry eyes. “Hey, what the hell are you saying? Are you calling us thieves, now?!”
All eyes in the room turned to us. The man wasn’t bothered at all. Instead, he almost ordered in a firm and cold as ice voice. “Sit down! I didn’t call you thieves. Only the court can decide on that.”
I tried to calm Ayhan down, who was aching for a fight. I had the ability to keep calm and be political in times of crisis. I tried to sustain Ayhan with a friendly warning and take the matter into my own hands.
“Sir, just what are you trying to accomplish? What’s your motive in trying to corner us? You as well as I know that we’re not thieves of any sort and…”
This time he interrupted me more harshly than before and stood up. “I don’t have any motive, I have duties. My duty right now is to catch you with the crime tools before the act of crime. Now get your stuff, we’re leaving…”
We didn’t move an inch. I asked him his name and what department he worked in; told him we wanted to see his police ID.
He’s become more arrogant then. “I don’t need to answer to you. A policeman doesn’t answer to criminals and runaways. The men at the station will read you your rights,” he said.
I locked eyes with the owner of the restaurant standing by the cashier, but he clearly didn’t know who this man was. The man stood up from where he was sitting. He had his strange, bloody eyes fixed on mine without blinking. His face was pale and his thin lips were a dark shade of purple. Suddenly, I saw the fresh looking scars on the left side of his neck, barely hidden by his collar. Upon realizing where I was looking at, he nervously fixed his collar with a quick hand. His hands had a strangeness that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, I noticed for the first time. These hands left me with nervousness and fright. My intuition never failed me; thus we were in danger.
Turning towards the door, he motioned for us to come outside. “Hurry up and come, I’ll be waiting outside,” he said.
There wasn’t a single moment of hesitation on his pale frame; his order was firm and clear. He walked out the door without once turning back. In a haze of uncertainty and confusion, we reached the cashier and paid our bill. The owner worriedly told us he didn’t know the guy, but that these days the streets weren’t so safe, and that they’d constantly hear of someone being attacked; that the local newspapers were on this for a few months now…
“Maybe he’s really a cop, I don’t know… Just in case though, you boys should go back home as soon as you can, alright?”
We were scared to the point of pissing our pants, but we still didn’t think to call the police and ask for help. We had run away from school using flashlights, thinking we were involved with illegal acts.  Ayhan suggested we beat him up with tools like knives and sticks from the kitchen; our chances were high as he was two against one.
I strongly argued against this violent plan. I tried to tell him, in my own clumsy way, that first of all, it would be harder than we think to knock this guy out.  “These lunatics are very strong. They call it ‘lunatic strength’, you know. Besides, they’re used to fighting from all the trouble they look for every night…” I said.
“That guy is a goddamn psycho…” he grumbled. “Not a lunatic!”
I looked for a way to calm him down. I wasn’t looking forward to get in a fight. “Look Ayhan, these streets are his home. This place is his ‘space’, his area, do you get it? We might not be able to get him down. Let’s not take that risk,” I told him. I didn’t want to fight.
His face was filled with rage this time. “I’ll smash his head in with only one kick, man!” he shouted.
“Okay, Ayhan. You might just do that, but what’s the point of fighting with this goddamn dog and making a fool of ourselves? If this goes to the police, which will, if we fight him in the middle of a street, we would have to explain ourselves to the police at the station, and they’re gonna lock us up, and we’re gonna get kicked out of school. The best thing we can do is, not get involved with this psycho and run back to school, alright?”
The idea that we might get into trouble with the police set him straight. I told him how we would escape. “Let’s walk around the ferry bridge to make him lose our trail, and then we’ll get on the ferry…”
We took a peek at him from the door. He was standing there in a corner, waiting for us under the streetlight across the street, wearing a long black coat with its collars up, looking like the wings of a bat. He seemed to have no doubt that we wouldn’t bail on him.
I thought of the scars on his neck, and shivered. Those fresh-looking scars looked like those of a cutting, stiff rope. I searched for a reason why they might be there, but I couldn’t. I asked Ayhan whether he noticed the indescribable bizarreness on those hands of his or not. He did; those marks and scratches, said they looked like nail and teeth scars. Almost as if…
I stopped the conversation short to prevent us from getting more worried, and skipped on to the escape plan. “Count to three, we go left again from the first street….”
I counted, and we hurled ourselves ahead. We were both soccer players; we could run pretty fast. We dived into the first dark street we saw to the left in a hurry, not looking back once. We turned left again by a pile of trash in the dark. After running about a hundred and fifty feet, we were at a loss when faced with a high garden wall. It was a cruel misfortune. Every moment we lost was of fatal importance to us. We could get caught; we could be late for the ferry…
Once we turned back and started running again to find another way to escape, our nerves were at a high end. Even after turning left, then taking another left turn and running for minutes we couldn’t get to Seaport Street. On top of that, we didn’t know where we were. We dove into the streets one after another, every one of them darker and scarier than the other… It was four in the morning, and the city was left with a fog, making it impossible to see through the air. Ayhan came to a sudden stop and signaled me to do the same. Out of breath, I went and stood by his side. My lungs were burning like they were on fire.
“I now see that I shouldn’t have listened to you,” he said breathlessly.
I didn’t think my escape plan would face so many obstacles. I reacted to his words, proposing that if he has a better idea, to please enlighten me. He started yelling. “After we beat that psycho in front of that restaurant, we were gonna get on the ferry and leave! It was that simple! Now look at us!”
“Don’t be stupid!” I said quickly; “Did you think that guy was just let us to kick him and beat him there, like a lifeless potato sack? Now don’t get all mad and raise your voice…”
“Would you prefer he caught up with us now, when we’re too tired to fight back? We made a mistake, man. A big mistake…”
“Don’t worry, Ayhan. Look, we made him lose our trail, and when we take this road to get to the quay…”
“It us who lost the trail, boy; we don’t even know how to get to the quay from here.”
I wasn’t about to sit and think of the consequences for my mistake. I cut it short and quickly went through all the roads we walked through in my head. “This street on the right s-should take us to the m-main road,” I could only say.
Just then, from the darkness not too far away from the street we were at, a giant bat appeared. We were scared to death. There wasn’t any single source of light in the foggy street. We were frozen to the ground. When he drifted towards us in his flying coat, I saw that odd twinkle in his eyes up close.
His whispering voice was polite. “Don’t run away, kids. Come, let’s have something to drink together, let’s talk.”
He was out of breath just like we were which meant he had been running after us from the start. He had reached out with his hands, walking towards us and getting closer. I was trying to figure out what he was after in my head; he wasn’t a simple psycho, he was a dangerous lunatic and he was going to kill us.
When he took a couple of more steps, Ayhan nervously shouted with a shaking voice. “What the hell do you want from us?! Don’t come closer!”
The man ignored Ayhan’s words, and kept coming closer. Ayhan had taken his position to attack. He was holding out his flashlight with a tight grasp, casting the light to the man’s face. “Hey, did you hear us; we’ll make the whole neighborhood come down here! I said don’t come closer!”
“Alright, calm down. Calm down… All I want from you is to be good kids. Come on, let’s talk a little…”
Not being able to stand it any longer, I clasped Ayhan’s arm. With all the strength it took me, I pulled him to the opposite direction and dragged his body along with me. We were running again. The dark streets insisted not taking us to the pier. I was running senselessly; I couldn’t see or hear anything now.
I almost toppled over when coming to a stop after tripping on a soft object in the middle of the street. I held on to the stone wall of a house with one hand and worriedly looked around. There was nobody in sight.
I went back in a hurry, trying to recognize the roads I came from. As I was about to shout for help, I felt a cold hand on my back and a big hand grabbed my shoulder. I yelled out with all the strength I had and turned around, throwing a fist. He got rid of me with a quick body movement and grabbed both of my arms like a press machine.
He was unbelievably strong. I let myself loose for a second and then broke free with all the strength it took me. I tried to kick his face in a fast move. He toppled me over by holding my lifted leg, crisscrossing my arms over my upper body with hands like metal clamps. Collapsing on my ribs, he pressed on my locked-in-a-twist hands, stuffing my mouth with his hand as he got his face very close to mine. I felt like everything was over when I looked at that dull, cold expression in his eyes. His bad breath burned my throat.
As a last effort, I tried to bite his hand over my mouth. Quickly he drew back, and without even giving me a chance to breathe, he landed a strong slap on my face. The back of my head I was about to lift hit the corner of the pavement. I felt no pain, with the paralyzing sense of horror taking over my body. He grabbed me by the collar with his other hand, and pulled me towards himself.
I was swallowed by the darkness with the sudden blow in my ear.
I remembered the first time my angel-faced mother took me to school, me and her walking up the stairs, her putting white sheets on the bed they showed us. Ah, my mother… When we said good bye, she kissed my curly-haired head with teary eyes. I was her little baby, and for the first time I was to stay overnight at a place other then my home. She gave me a ton of advice; she didn’t want me to get in trouble.
I hugged her tight, now I was crying too.
I literally woke up crying. I had the worst headache and the feeling of carrying tons of extra weight. I felt sick in my stomach, too. My arm was around Ayhan’s shoulders; he had grabbed me from my waist and was dragging me along. Once I felt a little bit more like myself, I asked him to let go of me. Holding on to a tree I hardly kept my balance and tried to rub out all the dirt on my pants. I was missing one shoe. I pulled my sock up a little, covered with dirt.
My teeth were clattering.
We were by the booths now. The ferryboat was by the pier, and the trucks had formed two lines, slowly proceeding towards it. I bent over at the nearest tree and puked my guts out. My eyes were full of tears; cold sweat was dripping off my back.
I returned to where Ayhan was with shaky legs. He was motionlessly standing there and staring at me. I noticed a deep cut on his face, from the corner of his swollen lips to his right cheek. He had the collar of his shirt ripped off, and the knees of his light-colored pants were stained with dirt and blood. I brought my hand to and touched the throbbing lump at the back of my head. For a while, I waited for Ayhan to speak up and fill me in on what happened back there.
He said nothing.
We bought our tickets and nearly crawled our way to the boat. We sat side by side at the wretched lounge upstairs. Ordered tea and lighted a smoke. His hand had become a swollen and bloody piece of meat, trembling as he held the match to the cigarette.
Once the ferry took off I looked out from the window, the sun had come up. I could see the silhouettes of people and cars getting smaller by the pier. My eyes searched for the silhouette of that goddamn son of a bitch. Once we left the pier behind and I calmed down, I ached to ask Ayhan, ‘Are you not going to tell me what happened?’ I thought about it, but couldn’t find the courage to do it. I examined him and myself once more; the condition we were in, and our torn clothes… Every time I looked I noticed something new and I shivered in breathlessly...
Then, I saw the mark on Ayhan’s neck. Involuntarily, I wanted to reach up and touch that disgusting and odd-looking cut with my fingers. With eyes full of hatred, he firmly pushed my hand back. I swallowed, pulling back a bit. At last, I noticed his lips slightly moving.
His voice was ice cold. “Let’s not see each other at school anymore, and let’s both…”
He paused. I knew what he was going to say. I finished his sentence. “Forget about tonight…”