Another thing I learned about Turkey was their intense fear of transsexuals. Apparently, gangs of trannies would walk around the city and you were never to mess with them because they carried knives they were not afraid to use. At first, I was reminded of living in India with the hejira, a group of transsexuals who in fact had a holy almost priestly status. They would go around to people’s home and you had to give them some money or some food or it was very bad luck. In India, these men/women were a tradition that has been going on for thousands of years and there was something marvellous and even glamourous about them (even though they looked quite terrifying).
Not in Turkey, though. Turkey’s trannies were ugly, unshaven, squeezed into tight outfits and generally looked very disagreeable. Many of them were prostitutes too and I honestly wonder sometimes what the hell is wrong with men that it would be pleasureable or excititng to go to someone like that for sex.
In our apartment building Basak, on Hatboyu Caddessi, number 25, we had the pleasure of living above one such transvestite prostitute. However, ours was quite attractive in his strange way. He was very tall, about 6’6”, had long curly hair down to his waist and seemed to take care of himself quite well. This probably explained why he had so much business, and so constantly.
Our flat was on the first floor, but there were two basement flats below us. One occupied by a seemingly religious family whose older female member wore a headscarf and never sat out on their patio with the men, and the other occupied by said tranny. The doorbells outside were not marked clearly and our button was right next to his/her’s. I was usually home alone most of the time, and would never answer the doorbell when it rang mainly because I hate walk-ins and people should call before they are coming over. Plus, a woman alone in a flat in a Muslim country and she doesn’t speak Turkish. Why on earth would I open the door for anyone unexpected???
It took me a little while to figure it out, but I began to notice a pattern. Our doorbell would ring, someone elsewhere in the building would hit the buzzer, and then music would start downstairs in the tranny’s apartment. First it would be loud clubby Turkish techno music, but loud. So loud the house would be vibrating. Then after about 30-45 minutes of that, there would be about 15 or 20 minutes of Turkish love songs, an abrupt silence and I would hear the door to the apartment building slamming shut. Always the same pattern, and at all times of the day. I’m talking 10 AM, 2 PM, 3AM. All fricking day.
Like a good little desperate housewife, I started using our seriously deficient peephole to see if I could spot the john’s going downstairs. Oddly enough, they all seemed to be quite normal men, some of them quite a bit older, and if they passed someone in the hallway they made absolutely no eye contact and just bolted downstairs. Extremely strange.
The worst part of it was when he/she would begin his antics at 2 or 3 in the morning. The music was so frickin’ loud and for some reason, noone ever said anything about it. No one in the building ever called the police, and there were only two times that someone even went and asked he/she to turn it down. Both of those times resulted in huge screaming fights between Mr. Religious downstairs and our friendly neighborhood Transvestite. Those were the two times I most wished I understood Turkish. I would have given anything to know what the hell they were saying.
So, we lived above this totally disrespectful and noisy guy for a year. Imagine our surprise when, just 10 days before Steve and I were leaving istanbul for good, when our neighbors attacked our apartment because we had music on (not loudly, mind you, just on), resulting in the arrival of the police and a huge blowout fight in which the neighbors went to Dilko twice to complain about us!
What happened was this:
Steve and I, along with two of his Dilko colleagues were at our apartment at 12:15 AM on a Saturday. They were drinking Raki and we had the iPod speaker on not even remotely loud, but I believe Missy Elliot or something was playing. All of a sudden, I hear a screaming coming from outside. The boys are blitzed and don’t notice, so I go to look. There is an old man going purple in the face, waving his fist and screaming at us. Dude, he himself was making far more noise than we even were! He starts screaming even more. I call the boys out. The man begins flinging himself at the gate that separated our apartment building from his. His son comes down and starts shouting at us. The old man runs to the street and comes back with a lead pipe, which he flings at our balcony. It misses, so he runs back to the street and comes back with rocks. All of which miss. He begins to throw his shoes. His daughter comes out of their apartment building and he begins to beat her across the face. Then she is screaming at us also.
I look up and there are about 2 dozen heads poking out from the windows in our apartment building and the 2 apartment buildings around ours. They all begin throwing things at us! Bottles, rocks, what have you. One of Steve’s colleagues is even nicked with a bottle thrown from our own apartment building! It was absolute chaos, and I had no idea what the hell we could have done that could have been worse than Mr. Tranny downstairs every night with his butt-banging music. It wasn’t even late! Our music wasn’t even loud!
Then, the police showed up. Oh God in Heaven. We all know about Turkish prisons and seeing the police cars drive up I felt my heart plummet into my toes. Fuck. So another of Steve’s colleagues goes out to talk to them, since he speaks Turkish, and I look over at Steve who is totally and completely wasted. Then, our doorbell rings. I look out the front door and actually thought it was Michael, Steve’s colleague. But, it was a policeman. Oh dear God.
Of course, he spoke a very minimal of English. None actually. But we somehow managed to communicate. He asked us if we had a problem, to which I replied ‘Problem yok.’ No problem. I even pointed downstairs to the tranny’s house and indicated the problem was there. Mr. Turkish Policeman took one look at Steve and made a smoking hash gesture with his one hand and that sipping sound of puffing. Anyone who knows Steve knows that after he has one beer his eyes are red and swollen and he looks absolutely well baked. So I make the smoking hash sign back to him and say ‘Yok yok yok! Raki, cok guzel!” “No, no, no. Raki very good!” To which the policeman begins to laugh and then we all laughed. He then told us to be quiet and have a good night. Off he went. Wow. Talk about intense, man. This whole thing lasted about an hour, and by 1:15 AM everyone was gone, and everything seemed quiet on the Turkish front. I was so keyed up with the trauma of the whole thing (they were throwing bottles at us! Old men were flinging themselves at gates to try and get to us! Stones! The Turkish Police!) that I stayed up to watch a show and try relax.
Like clockwork, around 2:00 AM what do I hear through my headphones??? Oh yeah, Mr. Tranny Hooker downstairs with his music that is literally shaking the apartment building. I am so not kidding. It continued until about 3:30 AM at which point I was to exhausted to stay up any longer and I don’t even know when he finished for the night. Can you imagine? I never heard any shouting at him. Or any calls to the police. Not a peep from the neighbors about it.
The next day, when Steve was recounting the mad tale to his students and colleagues, everyone concurred that it was an attack on us because we are foreigners and most likely because they are afraid of Mr. Tranny Whore. All of their pent up frustration at the prostitute as well as the political climate coupled with the fact that they all knew ours was a teacher’s flat led to the crazy mob mentality that resulted in bottle-throwing and the police at our door. Unbeleiveable. This is so a nation that belongs in Europe, don’t you think? Someone told Steve that there is a law in Turkey that prevents discrimination against transvestites and this is why the neighbors can do nothing about Mr. Tranny. I still don’t see what that has to do with noise complaints. What does telling someone their music is too loud have to do with discrimination against transvestites? Certainly they had no problem telling us the whispers we were making were too loud!
The most terrifying thing about the whole experience was how quickly the madness of that old man spiralled into mob violence from all the surrounding buildings. How it escalated just like that, in a Kaiser Soze moment of poof! and then there were police and paddy wagons, screaming from all sides. What a scary thing to realise how tenuous one’s place can be in a world that does not belong to you. I felt the danger from the moment we arrived in Bakirkoy, and in those moments all of it was so perfectly personified by everyone who participated. Thankfully, no one was hurt, no one was taken away, and we got out of Turkey in one piece. But My God, the savagery of their attack! Even animals are more civilised than that!
The neighbors went to Dilko twice to complain about us after the incident was over! I spent the last days in Istanbul fearfully peeping through our lopsided spyhole to make sure the hallways were clear before I would go out. That’s sort of how I felt the entire time we lived in Istanbul: always looking through the peephole in whatever situation to make sure the coast was clear before coming out. What a horrible way to live, and not unlike how the women in burkah’s must feel as they peer through their black shrouds day in an day out. I thank God that is no longer my life.
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