Travis's rant against Homophobes and the Screaming Drunk at the Monastery

My second night in Armenia I met ‘John’. John was a Peace Corp. volunteer who I had gotten in touch with through Couch Surfing. It was not hard to pick him out as he neither had black hair nor thick beard and he was not wearing a tracksuit. My first thought was that he had to be the best-dressed person I had seen in Armenia. We went to dinner at a quaint but beautifully appointed Georgian restaurant (Armenian food just doesn’t quite compare) then spent the remainder of the day light hours exploring sections of Vandazor that John had never been to and talking about everything from Armenia government corruption to what it was like to be a Peace Corp volunteer.

John is one of the better and more interesting people that I have met on my travels. He grew up in Twin Falls, Idaho on a horse ranch and joined the Peace Corp after college. What made his case, and his choice of Eastern Europe as the location for his two years of volunteer service especially impressive is that John is gay. Now, if either of my readers are ignorant as to what this mean just about anywhere in the world outside of urban centers in Western Europe and America let me enlighten you. Coming out as gay in almost every place I have visited across the world is the equivalent to painting a target on your back and accepting social rejection. It means your family and friends disown you. That there is no place for you in society and thus you become an outcast from it. I don’t want to get carried away but life is usually neither good or easy for those who are brave enough openly admit that they are homosexuals.

For John, being gay in Armenia meant that he would never be able to admit, even his closest friends, the real reason why he did not have a girlfriend and that there was next to no chance he would be able to have any kind of relationship for two years. He described to me one time when the subject of homosexuality came up in a conversation with one his close, well-educated, female, Armenian friends. In this conversation she said she could not understand why a cure had not been found for this disease or why there was not more treatment available for these poor, troubled people. Using most of his considerable self-control, John attempted to explain that it was not in fact a disease or problem but rather a different preference that people are born with. The friend would have none of it and insisted that she had seen studies proving otherwise.

Anyway, John’s experience with these kinds of situations was just one of the topics that we touched on during my first night staying with John.

The next day I was planning to go to two UNESCO World Heritage monasteries in a town about an hour and a half north of Vanadzor and from there continuing hitch hiking up to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. I was pleased when John accepted my invitation to come with me and, after my second pancake breakfast in as many days (god I love Peace Corp volunteers) we headed down to the bus station. On the way we decided to get some donuts from a little spot I had stopped at the day before, just to make sure we had a balanced breakfast.

Unfortunately, this gluttony caused us to miss the bus that we wanted. So, rather than be chumps and wait an hour for the next bus we walked to the edge of town and started hitching. A well-to-do couple and their BMW got us half-way and, just to make sure we got the full socio-economic spectrum of Armenia, our next ride was an old, black Russian Van driven by two friendly guys with an equally friendly hooker in the back. The door hinge was a slide-bolt very similar to the one on my father’s tool shed and took several open-hand punches to knock loose. We sat with the hooker on a couch in the back of the van that slammed into the sides of the van with every turn and, after exhausting the three Armenian words I had learned from my guild book, I sat back and let John entertain our benefactors.

When got to our destination I was confronted with one of the most contrasting scenes that I have ever witnessed; the town we had entered, Alaverdi, was situated on a river in a steep alpine valley, looked down upon by lush mountain peaks and surrounded by grassy steps. The juxtaposition came when we walked along the river towards the center of town and came into view of an old soviet smelting factory that looked as though it had been ripped from the pages of Lord of the Rings. The smoke stack was vomiting unfiltered smoke into the sky that shrouded the entire town in a carcinogenic fog. It was also heartening to see that a half-mile in every direction of the factory the lush alpine forest had turned to de-nuited, brown dirt.

When I commented on this John made me privy to a theory he had been developing wherein he believed that the Soviets had made it a goal to pick the most beautiful and pristine locations they could find in the U.S.S.R and put a factory there. It also turned out that, due to the ridiculously high rate of cancer in Alaverdi, the Peace Corp no longer allowed it volunteers to live or work there. Unfortunately, the other side of the coin was that, as the factory was by far the biggest employer in the town, it would be even worse to close it than it was to leave the monstrosity open. How’s that for the lesser of two evils?

After a few more minutes of gazing at the factory we took a gondola to the upper section of the town and started making our way towards the monastery. As we were walking up a steep, cobbled path we were literally ran into by a group of three older Armenian men. It was easy to smell alcohol on two of the men’s breath, but they seemed alert enough. The third man however was another story, he was wasted drunk, and why not? It was already 11:30am.

They were all very friendly and while I was shaking hand with the man who could barely stand, lets call him Jo, they told us that their home was very close by and they would be honored if we would come and drink some home-made vodka with them. As we politely declined, I loosened my grip on Joes hand in the universal signal that, though the handshake had been good, sadly, it was time to let go. Jo did not seem to get this subtle message, so I upped the ante and began to pull my hand gently away. Jo, realizing what was happening, did not like this and, insisting that we needed to come drink with him and his friends, began physically dragging me down the road.

I was too amused to protest so, with Jo dragging me and John walking closely behind chatting with the two other men, we went down a side road and up some stairs to their home. Though Jo was in no state to entertain, his two friends were the image of hospitality; bringing us bread, butter, cheese, tea and setting up glasses so we all could drink vodka. With John working as translator we chatted about where we were from and what we were doing there. Periodically throughout our conversation Jo would start yelling in slurred Armenian about how we were all brothers as he looked at me malevolently from under bushy, salt and pepper eyebrows. His friends would then try to calm him down, which would result in Jo trying to punch them and then putting his face centimeters from theirs as he bared his brown and gold teeth and hissed at them. After each of these outbursts he would calm down for a while and we would continue our conversation and take a shot of vodka (Jo was downing two for every one we did). After about half and hour we thanked our hosts and asked if we could get a picture with them before we left. They readily agreed so I pulled out the digital camera I had borrowed from my friend Basak for this trip (my camera had gotten some sand in its gears while beach camping). You would have thought I had pulled out the elixir of life by the way Jo lunged out of his chair and grabbed the camera. Apparently the existence of the camera greatly upset him, as he was doing his best to break it in half. I quickly, but with a good amount of effort, pulled the camera away from him before he could accomplish his mission and we got several self-timed shots. After this, Jo, apparently overwhelmed with grief, staggered as fast as he was able out of the house and up the street. Our more sober hosts walked us to the door, apologizing for their friend, and wishing us the best. After slamming my head into the metal frame of their door, John and I assured them it was no problem, thanked them profusely for their hospitality and continued up the road.

As we rounded the next corner in the road we saw Jo staggering in front of us. John moaned and told me that maybe if we don’t move he wouldn’t see us. Unfortunately, even in his inebriated state, Jo’s vision was more evolved than that of a Tyrannosaurus and he spotted us. Resigned, we walked the short distance to the monastery with Jo alternately draping his arm around mine or Johns neck and slurring at us in Armenian. We got the monastery without much incident other than Jo hassling some pretentious-looking German tourists. However, once we got in the monastery we decided that it was high-time to ditch Jo. This, surprisingly, was relatively difficult as he was following us like a remora. After a while, though, we were able to ditch Jo in a corner of the main chapel by pointing a doorway out to him and running away as soon as he entered it.

As we power walked out the main building we heard a dismayed cry echo through the ancient stone halls; Jo realized what had happened. We made it out to the cemetery and after a few minutes were able to get our laughter under control. No sooner had we done this than we heard an agonized, clearly drunken, scream echo out of the church to the cemetery. Looking at each other in disbelief we were once again reduced to fits of giggles. Over the next five minutes we heard three more such screams and after the third we decided that the poor old women, who was selling candles in the main hall where we had left Jo, should not have to deal with this drunkard alone.

The scene that greeted our eyes when we stepped back over the threshold into the main hall was like nothing I had ever seen before and that I hope I will never see again. The women who had been selling candles at a table next to the right wall of the hall was standing up, waving her hands over her head, near tears and yelling. The object of her hysteria the reader can easily guess; Jo. He had stolen the woman’s chair and was leaning back against the wall with it as he eyeballed the old women. Now, this by itself may seem at the least disrespectful, but when you take into account that Jo had managed to remove his shirt and had his hand shoved down the front of his pants, massaging his crotch you can understand our suprise.

It took a moment for John and I to process what was going on, but once we had wrapped our head around the fact that Jo had stolen a pious old woman’s chair and was half naked and trying to pleasure himself in a UNESCO World Heritage monastery we decided he had to leave. Removing Jo from the monastery was not easy and involved John and I bodily grapping his arms and trying, with him resisting every inch of the way, to walk him out of the church while he threatened to kill us. We got him to the main door of the hall at which point he began violently struggling, this led to John and I simultaneously releasing his arms and culminated in his body twisting 180 degrees in the air before finally slamming down on the dirty rock floor. At this point it wasn’t even funny, it was just sad. He got to his feet after a few moments and, as I was the first person he was able to focus his bloodshot eyes on, he decided I was the agent of his torment and took a swing at me. Now, I’m not exactly fast but I think a paraplegic would have been have been able to get out of the way of that punch. Jo’s thwarted attacked resulted in him ending up, once again, face down on the muddy floor of the monastery.

At this point the old women, looking at Jo with utter contempt, told us to leave him and she would go call the police to take care of it. As Jo did not look like he would be moving any time soon, we agreed and left the monastery.

After walking for a few minutes in silence John looked at me and said, “Well that’s never happened to me before.” I had to agree with him, this was a first.