"Queer as Faith"
by Nathan Gunter

Queer as Faith is a weekly column by Nathan Gunter.  Unconventional and thought-provoking, Nathan writes as a gay Christian struggling to live authentically in the real world.

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Week 29:
Thirst in Ljubljana

Here's a story about thirst.

When I was living in Italy, my house was peopled with a majority of sorority girls and fraternity guys. These were typical college people, the kind you might see on The Real World now that it has lost all sense of cultural or social relevance. They were all nice enough, for the most part, if not exactly the kind of people I relish being around. They had all been the popular kids in high school, and had come to Europe with a very specific vision of what a semester abroad would look like: hash bars in Amsterdam, drunken nights at Oktoberfest or glasses of wine at bistros in Paris. Which is all fine, if not a bit unimaginative.

For my part, I'd come to Italy to meet God, I hoped, and to have some adventures. I was poor, of course, which was the one thing which continually set me apart from most of my college friends. Also, I had long hippie hair and bad clothes (I look back and cringe), and a whole lot of confusion, sadness, and overwhelmed anxiety about being further from home than almost anyone I knew had ever been.

I lived on the first floor of a huge villa on the Grand Canal, right next to the Collezione di Peggy Guggenheim, the only modern art museum in Venice. The house was breathtakingly gorgeous, with an open, sunny courtyard, large halls, a dock on the Canal, and random American tourists stopping by to constantly take tours, which I, unlike most of my house mates, was all too happy to give.

The library was well-stocked, and since we only had four days of class a week, I found myself taking long walks through the winding alleyways of Venice, reading things like Aaron Copland's What to Listen for in Music or Dante's Divine Comedy. Looking back, it seemed like a nice enough life, but part of me was always gasping for air. I think it was because I had had the spiritual tar beaten out of me as a missionary in Ireland the previous summer, and was recovering by walking over the bed of hot coals that were questions about my sexuality, my faith, Jesus, and home. Also, I was lonely.

There were only three people in the entire continent of Europe who made me feel less alone that semester. One of them was Mauro, who was a painter who stationed himself just outside the door of the Guggenheim, painting his little works and talking to whomever came by. He always wore the same blue coat, and was one of those people who severely unnerved most people when they spoke to him. I found him absolutely fascinating.

Our theory about Mauro was that when he was young, he was a child prodigy, or a genius. He told us he'd been an engineer, which led us all to speculate that he'd been one of those people who gets so into math it leaves them a bit unhinged, like Laslow in Real Genius. When you'd talk to him, he'd go on and on in his broken English about Jesus, or the color of the painting he was working on.

What freaked me out, of course, was that I understood him. I could look at his canvas and say, in my broken Italian, "Aah, Mauro, a yellow picture today, eh?" even though visibly, there really was nothing to distinguish the yellow in the painting from the bright aqua, or maroon, or blue. And yet, every time, I seemed to see the painting the way Mauro saw it, and whether we were discussing color, or atmosphere, or Jesus, or Thich Nhat Hanh, I seemed to hit the nail on the head. The fact that I understood Mauro so well made me feel both more and less alone, as if we were the only two people left on this sinking ship of a world who were still making sense.

Except that we weren't, because there was also Jack. Jack was one of my roommates, and he was absolutely one of the oddest, loudest, most off-putting and interesting people I've ever known. He was the second person that semester who constantly helped me to feel as if I was not alone, or insane, or riddled with B.O. If most of the people in the house found me mildly uninteresting, they found Jack downright frightening. There was no telling, when he came at you, what volume setting he'd be on. Sometimes it would be a priestly, humble almost-whisper, and others, a Memorex ad, with you standing there, trying to listen, feeling as if your hair was blowing back.

Jack's ambition was - and still is - Anglican priesthood, although his theology at times shared more in common with Mel Gibson's than I liked. Jack was crazy about a girl who lived in Poland, and everyone in the house knew about it. Jack also had some issues with women, which the people in the house also knew, although he was one of my first college friends to get married (to a Honduran - I think these American women just weren't Jack's speed) and to have a baby, who is now a month old and beautiful. And Jack always seemed to surprise me with some bit of wisdom when I seemed particularly down or freaked out.

I think Jack always felt a little out of place at Wake Forest, because, like me, his family was not affluent, and he was two years younger than almost everyone, having grown bored with high school in his sophomore year and completing a GED before enrolling in college. No one seemed to share his passion for daily vespers, or for good old Latin mass. Once, he'd ordered a set of vestments so he could assist a priest friend of his with the morning services, and when they'd arrived, he'd come streaking out of the campus post office like a speed addict, eager to show it to the first people he encountered, who just happened to be me and our friend Tish. After a five-minute lecture on the fabric, design, and symbolic meaning, and the general, aggressive happiness with which it all imbued him, he took off. Tish looked at me and said plaintively, "Well, I guess everybody needs a little black dress."

I was the only person in the house who really got Jack, because from the second we'd met I'd been absolutely grateful to have him as a friend. He and I were the oddest little pair, too - both short and oddly-shaped, him with his mood-swingy Catholic self, and me in all my drag-queenish evangelical emotiveness. He brought lamb to my dorm room once, with mint jelly, and when we were in Italy, he was always glad to share a glass of wine, a French-fry pizza, and a long, theological conversation, the two of us pitting Anglican theology against Reformed Calvinism. We challenged each other, and traveled all over Europe. Jack was a Greek major, so we spent a week travelling the Pelloponesus.

The first trip we took, however, was born out of what bound us together the most: our complete differentness from the rest of our housemates. It was the weekend of Oktoberfest, and every single one of the 18 other students with whom we lived were headed to Munich en masse. Our professor, who was German, told Jack and me that Oktoberfest had, over the years, devolved into a giant, drunken festival attended mostly by American students studying abroad. Sounded just like our house most nights.

Yawn.

When we pressed Helga, the professor, further, she told us we should check out Slovenia - it was only a five-hour trip by train, and the capital city, Ljubljana, was gorgeous and Alpine and post-Communist and absolutely fascinating.

Well, like most of the trips I took during my time in Europe, our journey to Ljubljana was all of those things, and a bunch more, including, on more than one instance, a - what's the term? - total pain in the ass. We were late getting to our train, almost missed a 2 A.M. connection at the Italian border, and arrived in Ljubljana after four. Then, we had to wander about, with no map, trying to find our hotel. In the former Yugoslavia. Looking entirely too much like Americans.

Eventually, after much fear, we got there.

After that, things got pretty fascinating. We wandered around, which was mostly what the two of us did in Europe. We weren't too interested in tourism, or taking a lot of pictures, and we thought that this made us cooler, more intellectual than the people with whom we lived, when really, it just meant we had tired feet and strong legs. We managed to come across a free wine tasting one morning, and were drunk enough by ten A.M. that we felt entirely up to the challenge of hiking up to Ljubljana Castle. Not an easy task.

It was in Ljubljana that I met the third person all semester who made me feel a bit more connected, and a lot less alone. She was in my life for a total of probably eight minutes, and it took me a lot longer than that to understand the impact she'd had on me.

See, after we'd checked in to our hotel, and gone to see Gladiator in Slovenian (didn't improve the movie any), and had a nice dinner the first night, we were pretty much out of money. So we decided to get through the final two days of our excursion by stocking up on sandwich supplies at a market near the hotel. We were on our way there when a young girl came stumbling out of a nearby park, obviously drunk or high, and dressed quite fashionably. She was no more than twenty, and clearly, in bad shape.

Now. I'm nothing like Jesus in that, when someone comes up to me acting strange, or uncouth, I am totally unable to handle it with any modicum of grace or poise. If someone ever tried to wash my feet with their hair, for example, I might actually have an episode, because, well, all evidence to the contrary, I consider myself heavily couth.

So when this young Slovenian woman came stumbling up to us, we did our best to engage in our own private conversation, building around ourselves a bubble that said at once, "Don't come close, we're all wrapped up in our own little important world here and you can't mess that up," and, "Please don't hurt us, we're just scared Americans. We'll go home right away if you just keep walking, please, keep walking!"

Of course, I've learned in the intervening years that when God presents you a situation like this, which seems like a trap, an ambush, or a nightmare, she's usually trying to get you in there to mix it up, because someone needs it mixed, and that person is you, not this ragamuffin you're trying to avoid. So of course the girl stopped in front of us - she kind of skidded to a halt, really - and began to speak.

Having been in Slovenia for about 12 hours, we understood nothing, and we tried Italian, and then English. She understood just enough English to ask, "Do.... you... have... any... drinking?" I thought she was asking for booze, or money to buy booze, because I actually do tend to think the worst when I'm panicking. Jack was no better than I, of course, because we both looked at each other with these expressions - "So this is how we're going to die" - and held out our hands to show we had nothing.

The girl stood another moment, and we stared, and everything seemed to hold its breath. Then, she stumbled away, and my heart felt free to beat again, if not a bit faster than normal.

We made it to the market, which, it turned out, seemed to be run by someone who apparently hadn't gotten the memo that Communism had ended in this corner of the world, because, other than bread and little jars of things that resembled Vienna sausages, there was almost nothing except beer, cake icing, and Schweppes Bitter Lemon, which is carbonated water that tastes like it was brewed in someone's air conditioner. Still, it was wet, and cold, so I bought one, and some beer, and we headed back to the hotel.

As we left the market, we saw the young girl once again, coming up the street, perhaps having composed herself a bit but still a wreck. She looked like a young version of Edina Monsoon, stumbling down the street, crying out, "Sweetie darling! Sweetie darling!" Only she was quiet, and her face, I suddenly realized, was full of this sadness, this disappointment at herself, like maybe this was the first time she'd ever been drunk in her life, and she was thinking, "Mom's going to kill me when she finds out." Or like maybe she had nowhere to go at all. She looked a lot like the thing inside me that had been so lonely and sad this whole time, dressed in its finest clothes to try to placate itself.

She came up to us again, and Jack said, "We should give her something." I thought, "You and your stupid charity. Can't we just run away? No way she could catch us." But, she was on us by this time, and I couldn't tell if she recognized us, but she made the international hand symbol for drinking, so I looked in my bag. Beer - not a good idea, probably. So I handed her the Schweppes Bitter Lemon.

She looked at me as if I'd just turned into a kitten before her eyes - completely thunderstruck. Problem was, we had no bottle opener, and when we all realized this, there was another moment of held breath. I handed her my keys, because by this time her eyes were welling up with tears, and because they were the best I could offer, like the Schweppes.

She took the keys from me, and in one swift movement she ripped the cap from the bottle and began to drink, heavily, deeply, as if she'd never had a drop of water in her life. Jack and I watched, confounded, as she finished the bottle in a flash. When she was finished, she handed it back to me, looking profoundly grateful, and I could only think, "Holy Crap!"

I've since known that kind of thirst, in the days when I worried about my own drinking. But even then, there, on that sidewalk, I saw in her something that we all know: thirst. Whether physical or spiritual, we all seem to live our lives, stumbling and lurching about from place to place, begging for something we just can't get hold of by ourselves. I felt like I was a little more connected in that moment, to something sad, and old, and really beloved, inside us all.

Now. I don't consider this act one of my more heroic moments, considering how afraid I was through it all, and I certainly don't applaud myself when I think about it. I think about how lost and afraid I was at the time - and how much more so I became later on in life - and I just never feel as lonely when I think of her. She seemed to get whatever it was that Jack and Mauro were on to, because the three of them thirsted. Maybe Mauro did it because he was crazy, and Jack because he was so different, and she because - well, maybe she was a drunk, or just sad, I don't know. I did it because I was lonely, because often, loneliness is where I live.

Sometimes, thirst can only be slaked by asking for a drink.

So Jack and I headed back to the hotel, and finished off the beers, and went out for the night, and I was secretly hoping to run into the girl again and get to talk, even through what little language we shared. I wonder what ever happened to her. Maybe I'll get back to Ljubljana someday and see her. Maybe you will. If you do, tell her thanks for me, that she gave me as big a drink that day as I gave her, maybe bigger, because she still reminds me that we're all in this soup together, and we don't have to be in it alone.

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