(Here is an excerpt chapter from my memoir Sex and Homeland... Note: This writing deals with some heavy issues and is not for everyone. If you are so inclined please send me feedback!)

Sertaç and Engines Running Over White Palace

  Sertaç had got the Portuguese translator job with Turkey’s biggest soccer team and his stomach had started to grow. Flying high we drove fast around the city in a team car, followed by a rich Brazilian girl he was fucking. All things were possible! In Istanbul the roads were gold paved! We drove along the Bosphorus, the girl passing us, Sertaç passing the girl. He was speaking to me in Turkish and then she was calling him on his cell in Portuguese. He had a full can of cold beer.

When we first met, Sertaç had a sales job with ties and shoe shines and 6 o’clock rising and 14 hour days; long bus rides and ferry rides with the rest of the commuting clump of middle class Istanbul. Now he was riding high – respected – at 23 he had found his place!

In the quiet times when the car wasn’t roaring over the hills of Istanbul, carrying international Brazilian football players from one restaurant to another press conference, Sertaç waxed about his past. I felt I had a glimpse into his life; private, something forbidden, shown to me alone. At those moments he would often remember the bad times out loud; suffering it again was a holy ritual for him. I felt lucky to be in his presence then.

We drove past Dolmabahçe Palace along the Bosphorus in the Besiktas district. Towering poplar trees lined the sides of the coastal road between the Palace and the rest of the city. Trunks of the trees were brown and red colored marble in the neon night light. The trees changed colors and this city which can be so agonizingly ugly and so painfully beautiful was painful that night. The leaves fell like pieces of silver in the car lights.

Further on, Sertaç revved up the base of a hill, going into the city.

Both of us wanted to do something tonight and we were young and this urge scratched at the back of our heads. The Brazilian girl named Paula was the one he was fucking but he wanted something else.

We began to talk about Russian prostitutes and the pimps that Sertaç had met through the soccer team.

I can’t lie and pretend that the movement of a forbidden woman – her sex on the street – is not appealing. I can’t pretend that her body and sexuality don’t stretch my dick into warm orange throb. Perhaps I am a disgusting fool. A pig and wrong headed. And it is true prostitution is a terrible thing; rapine and mendacious. After the act is done it is empty… But then there is the sex, the process of it. And sometimes a good fuck is pretty goddamned nice. Even if you are in love and the girl loves you, she still has a big pussy that needs filled and you have a big dick to fill it. We all want to feel wonderful and used. Maybe we feel a little less used if we love each other but at times, the emptiness is still there.

The prostitute is the fullest extent of the sex moment. I want to understand this. I can’t make sense of it anymore than that. I am drawn to them.

“Let’s go to Aksaray,” I said to Sertaç. “We can look at all the Eastern European girls there. Maybe we won’t buy or anything but I want to see it.” “All right!” Sertaç exclaimed, speeding up behind Paula. He passed her on the hills behind Ortaköy. We slid into the lane next to her. A car was coming down at us, going the other direction. We were in the wrong lane and it was all our fault. Going too fast up the hill everyone-will-die then Sertaç brakes and we slide just in the bird’s ass nick-of-time into the right lane, missing the descending car by nano-seconds.

The car trailed off down the hill below, blowing its fading horn at us.

“Well.. maybe that wasn’t the best idea,” Sertaç said quietly, smiling, his bravado lessening a bit. Jesus.

At the top of the hill, in a district called Bebek Yokusu, we stopped behind Paula at the front gate of the condo complex where she lived with her brother-in-law’s family. Her brother-in-law was one of the highest paid defensive backs in the Turkish Soccer league.

Bebek Yokusu is a rich neighborhood. Looking out of Paula’s brother-in-law’s condo, verdant trees ploomed and spread in dark silver, crowded and closed all the way down to the Bosphorus. You could see the whole damn thing from up there. Far off the Bosphorus was a sliver of black between the lights of Asian and European Istanbul. It was beautiful.

Sertaç and I got out of our car and walked to Paula’s car. Paula had a sun burnt swimsuit model’s beauty. Her hair was always too short and too styled. She was hopelessly Brazilian and thus unable to see the amazement of Turkey. Paula longed for Rio and Sao Paulo, pinning for the vastness and warmth of her country. These Brazilian soccer players and their families accepted the money in this far away corner of the world and were polite but at heart they didn’t feel at home in any place other than a Latin speaking country. Sertaç was the closest thing Turkish that Paula could accept. To her he was a Middle Eastern Brazilian; alien yet speaking safe.

She stood out of her car and kissed Sertaç on the lips, saying goodbye.

She asked us, “What are you doing tonight?”

“Going for a drive.”

She looked suspicious. Maybe she was still weirded out by the almost accident on the highway up to her brother-in-law’s condo or maybe she could sense we planned on seeing Eastern European pussy that night. I’m not sure. You never know with women.

At any rate Paula got suspicious. Sertaç might cheat on her and she was in love with him and she could sense he might cheat on her.

“Be careful in what you are doing,” she said to Sertaç in English.

Back in our car he rolled his eyes. “Be careful in what you are doing.” He laughed. “Yeah, let’s be careful.”

We drove back into the heart of the European side, past gleaming Ak Merkez the most expensive shopping mall in Turkey and down through Mecdiyeköy which 40 years ago was reportedly just farm fields but is now a major hub, a belt buckle of the European side, hooking everything together, the Bosphorus Bridge, Ortaköy, Sisli…[1]

We went down to Besiktas again and skirting the shore we came to Karaköy. That part of the city was deserted at night. A big district with nothing happening, as if the buildings were laid out for no reason. The neon glow of advertisements lit up the centuries old buildings and bricks. The empty port authority and old Mosques were beautiful in a dead sort of way. We passed a parked car with an open passenger door and off in an alleyway a man was taking a leak; the silhouette of his urine in a curl and the smell of the wharf putrid – as black as the night.

We drove over the Golden Horn Bridge into Eminönü and the oldest section of the city. We passed Sirkeci Train Station, the famous end of the Orient Express which in the time of European power ran from Paris to the “Paris of the East” Istanbul.

I said to Sertaç as the cobble stone of the old city ricocheted off the car tires, “I’m really not sure I want to buy a prostitute.. I mean I do find it kind of..”

“What?” he asked. “What is it?”

“I, I don’t know man, I have interest in doing something but I am not sure if this is ahhh, what I want. A good chance I just want to look. A good chance.”

“You’ll want to do more than that because you ARE A MAN!” He said and hit the gas. This was my Sertaç, half the time lost in mediocrity and typical Turkish manhood.

On the other side of the Golden Horn was Aksaray, den of whores and thieves.

It was a mess, filled with bars and cheap hotel rooms to fuck pussy you paid for. I had only ever passed by in the day time and never entered the district. There were people everywhere, passing in front of the local police station.

As we drove a text message came on my cell phone. It was from Berfin. She was Istanbul personified. Weeping and broken; pristine and amazing... two at once, my whore of Istanbul.

Her text told me to have sweet dreams.

“It is from Berfin.”

Sertaç didn’t saying anything, just nodded and looked over at me. He didn’t like Berfin. She didn’t like him. He was a masogonist pig. She was a scrum ridden liberal whore. They had met only once and I didn’t think I would introduce them again.

Besides Berfin I was dating Deniz then too. But I was in love with Deniz. She was a film maker. Distant and artistic Deniz would go days without texting me... I didn’t know where she was. I looked out the window and thought about Deniz. She could be anywhere right now. She could be hiding with her mother from her father or she could be working 22 hour long days on a new Turkish televison show. Anything was possible with anyone.

The clock on my cell phone said 11:30.

We pulled up next to a corner shop and Sertaç got out to buy some beer. The streets in Aksaray, like all Istanbul streets, are crooked and confused but in Aksaray everything buzzes with light. The hotels looked new and modern. Next to us a giant truck was trying to back up. It couldn’t get out, was trapped by three roads, each going off in a different direction. Men were out on the sidewalks trying to guide the truck from its quagmire. It was like trying to move a shaken rhinoceros from its swamp. The truck gagged; honked and squealed its engine.

I watched the truck and wondered if it might drive backward and hit the Lexus team car I was in. Sertaç returned with his beer, stepping over a large pile of trash and avoiding the tail end of the truck.

We drove on. We saw women and men on the streets together and the women were with the men, walking arm in arm. They were prostitutes; all the women out at night in Aksaray were prostitutes.

We passed a main road looking over at a large cupolaed white Mosque, hundreds of years old like a palace in the night. It was pure white and the architecture was slender and graceful. Each tiny curvature created a vast movement like a frozen white wave. Down a wide alleyway from the White Palace/Mosque we passed a group of pimps. We passed slowly.

I asked Sertaç why we didn’t just call his Russian contacts. He said he had already tried that and that they weren’t answering their phones. “Just leave everything to me. Don’t worry. I will take care of it all. Don’t say you are American. They’ll think you are rich and fuck us on price. Say you are from Poland. Only speak Turkish if they ask you a direct question. From now on only speak English with me. We work together in an Import/Export firm and I want to show my good foreign friend Istanbul’s night life.”

The pimps called out to our car in Turkish. They used a lot of slang which was hard to understand but the meaning was more of less obvious. “Hey brother, do you need some ambience? Can we help change your ‘milieu’?”

Sertaç talked to a few of them. The conversations were close and manly; shoulders were patted, arms squeezed, eye contact constant. The important thing among Turkish men is to relate within the closed fraternal culture of masculinity. Simply put, Turkish culture is Islamic at root. In Islamic culture there is a strict division between men and women. Consequently, one sees that Turkish men have a special culture among themselves (and Turkish women have a special culture among themselves). In Turkey being a man and using the right words and expressions is everything. If one can do this, a man enters the brotherhood of Turkish men and once there he lives safe or at least relatively safe.

We came to a pimp on the street who looked younger than the rest. He was short and muscular. “Merhaba abi” he said to us (“Hello big brother.”).

I didn’t like the young pimp’s eyes but Sertaç continued talking to him. The pimp’s accent was thick from the south of Turkey. His accent was like that of Sertaç’s family.

“Where are you from my man?” Sertaç asked.

“From the south, my brother. Antep.”

The city and province of Antep or Gaziantep was Sertaç’s memleket. A memleket means one’s homeland and has a special reverence within Turkish culture. The memleket is where your blood, your ancestry, your history are from. In a land like Anatolia[2], with one of the oldest histories on earth, one’s memleket is a mythic place filling an Anatolian’s heart with reverence. To meet a hemsehri or fellow countrymen from the old country is something holy too. It is believed a hemsehri can never do anything bad to you. One can ask money from a hemsehri; can ask for lodging from a hemsehri. The world is fast and supposedly devoid of the old country’s honor in Istanbul. And so, Istanbulites look back to their homelands with longing[3].

I knew when the pimp said he was from Gaziantep, he would probably get our business. He started to look at me more and more while he was speaking with Sertaç. He couldn’t place me. He was a little confused, “Where are you from, brother?”

“Poland.”

“He is our foreign guest, my friend.”

“Well, anyone who is a friend of my hemsehri is a friend of mine,” the pimp said and extended his hand across Sertaç to me.

I took it smiling and said, “Thanks my brother.”

“You know Turkish?” he asked me, holding my hand milliseconds too long.

“Yes, certainly I do.” Again I didn’t trust him.

He smiled wide, very polite.

“Well how can I help you?” he asked Sertaç.

“We are looking for some ladies. We are looking for a fun ambience for tonight. Maybe, my brother, you can help us.” I noticed Sertaç’s Turkish shifting to the south Turkey/Antepian accent. Normally he always spoke Turkish with the official Istanbulite accent but now his homeland was coming in.

“Of course I can help you. Come on!” The pimp opened the back door and hopped in the backseat. It was very weird and I didn’t feel at all comfortable with him in our backseat. 

But Sertaç didn’t seem to mind and he was the one who was Turkish.

“Follow my directions and I will show you how to get to our bar.”

“Okay,” Sertaç said.

I listened to their conversation nervously. Sertaç calmly began complaining about Istanbul, “It is all about money, brother. Not about anything else.”

“You’re right. You’re right. There is nothing else.” The pimp said distantly as if for a moment the mask was dropping and I could tell he didn’t give a shit about what Sertaç was saying, was just agreeing for agreement’s sake.

We came to a bar on a quiet back street with flowers and plants along the front. No one was outside. Inside, a group of three very burly men were sitting at a table by the front door. No women were with them. They watched us as we entered. They didn’t speak.

At the back of the bar was a black stage with lights. Romanian and Moldavian girls danced around to music on the stage. The girls dressed in bikinis. They danced without passion, distant and foggy eyed. There were picturesque hour glass shaped girls and flabby walrus-like girls moving around in a circle.

Close up to the stage was a large table filled with seven burly men who were drinking soda water.

There was no one else in the bar.

The pimp sat us close to the stage. The table of seven big men occasionally glanced over at us.

The stage took on a profane, perfect light. These prostitutes had transformed themselves. They were more than normal women. They sold their thighs, breasts and haughty jaws… This selling was special somehow. Even the ugly ones were special and became more lust filled and attractive. I wanted to live with a nice woman who was nurturing, who I could share my heart with, who I didn’t have to feel empty with after I came in her. Yet, the call of the sold pussy dancing, the wave of emptiness before, during, and business-like after was forbidden and perfect. It satiated the soul and dizzied the brain. One felt horrible and wonderful at the same moment.

When they were done dancing, some of the girls came down from the stage and sat next to us. They spoke in broken Turkish and looked dejected. It was just a game, it was just business. Their skin was soft and their perfume was turgid in my nostrils. Their limbs were supple and young. I was a kid in a candy store.

We spoke with them a bit. The table became filled. It was becoming too much, the table itself started to totter from the weight of the women. All of them asked for drinks. Sertaç and I said no. The pimp was sitting with us. He asked for drinks.

We were served beers. Sertaç and I didn’t touch the beers.

Suddenly we heard a (pop!). And another (pop!). And another (pop!). They were opening mineral water which had been corked to look like Champagne. They were serving the girls even though we kept saying no, no,no we aren’t paying for any of that, we didn’torderit! But now it was getting too late, very late for Sertaç and I.

He said to me in English, “Drink your beer. All of it and let’s take the girls sitting next to us and hope we can get out of here.”

We slammed our beers, and I sat back with a brain buzz, not used to beer.

Sertaç said to the pimp and to another man who had joined our table that we wanted the girls sitting next to us and we wanted to leave right now. The girl sitting next to me was a brunette and I actually I started to protest in Turkish that I wanted a blond one but in mid-sentence I shut up as the realization of where we were and what was happening crept over my beer addled mind.

“You can’t have those girls,” said the son-of-a-bitch pimp... said the honor-less pimp....

There is a story my father told me when I was a kid. I don’t remember when he told me but it was probably on one of our father/son hunting trips we used to take. We’d drive up highway 51 to northern Wisconsin (the only way to get up there) and the snow flakes would be falling, the whole of the forests and hills blanketed white and dead of leaves except the many pine trees, stark endless ever-green in the white. Inside our truck it was warm and his black beard and rosy Welsh eyes watched the road while his lips told me this story....

“There once was a kind, young, beautiful woman. She was walking home and it was winter and she saw buried in the snow a snake. The snake was very weak and dying. ‘Help me,’ it whimpered.

“She picked up the half frozen snake and took pity on it. She took it home, fed it and allowed it to get strong. After a few weeks the snake was back to its old self again. Coiling and zooming around her house. One day, after work the woman came home and couldn’t find the snake. It wasn’t in the living room and it wasn’t in the kitchen. It wasn’t in the bathroom and it wasn’t in the basement. She shrugged, made her self dinner and went to bed.

“As she was getting into bed the snake lunged out at her from its hiding place under her pillow and sunk it’s fangs into her face and torso. As she lay there dying, the venom coursing through her veins, she looked up at the snake and asked it, ‘How could you do such a thing to me? I saved your life! I brought you back to my home. I cared and loved and nurtured you!’

“‘You dumb bitch... I’M A SNAKE.’”

... everything changed after the pimp said that. The girls scattered away and an older man who was dressed like a waiter sat down next to us. The pimp no longer said anything just agreed with what the older man said.

“You guys have a bill to pay and you ARE going to pay it,” said the older man.

“We didn’t drink anything but two beers,” said Sertaç.

“Who is this idiot?” the older man indicted me.

“He’s my friend.”

“Where is he from?”

“Poland.” I said.

The older man looked at me wan and then his face twisted, enraged. “You speak Turkish?” He almost shouted.

“A little.”

“Well my rich foreigner, You... Have... Got.... A lot... To.... pay! Amina koyayim.” Amina koyayim is one of the worst curse words in Turkish. It means literally, “I shall put it to the cunt” but has a few different meanings. It could mean “I shall fuck your cunt” (which said to a woman means that the speaker intends to fuck her vagina while to a man it means that the speaker intends to fuck his asshole) or might mean “I shall fuck your woman’s cunt” (and by “woman” the speaker could mean your mother, your sister, your daughter, your wife, your grandmother, or your girlfriend). Yes, in Turkish cursing there is a lot of cunt-fucking going on. It makes talking dirty to a Turkish girl in bed a lot of fun too.

But I digress… Sertaç continued, “We only drank two beers. We were looking for some women. Your man said to us we could get some women here. We will still buy two women from you. That is not a problem. You want to talk about-?”

“Goddamnit, you think I am a pimp?” said the older man. “This is a legal bar and you are making a lot of mistakes. You’d better be quiet until we can figure out what to do with you.” The older man gazed off in the distance and then looked back at Sertaç and me. “I have to think what in the world I am going to do with asses like you... Alright, you are just going to pay the bills for your beers and the Champagne you ordered for the girls..”

Sertaç exploded. “That wasn’t Champagne!! It was mineral water! And we never ordered it!”

The older man just stared at Sertaç for a long time, stretching his arms over the table. It made Sertaç shut up. I patted Sertaç’s hand and said to him in English, “Calm down man. There is nothing we can do.”

The older man glared over at me and pushed my hand away from Sertaç’s, “Let’s get your bill.”

The seven huge guys with scars on their faces at the table behind us all worked for the bar and the three door men, who were also very big, worked for the bar. And of course the bar was owned and run by the Turkish mafia which meant, in the end, that we had to be polite and hope for the best price.

They brought us a bill for $350.

“We can’t pay this!” Sertaç said.

The older man shrugged. “What do you want us to do? You made a mistake and this is your price.”

“Indeed, indeed,” agreed the pimp.

“Can we see the price list, the menu?” I asked.

“Of course,” said the waiter who had brought us the bill. The waiter called to one of the other waiters by the bar to bring a sign from behind the bar. The other waiter brought it over to the table and offered it up in sumptuous fashion. This whole menu presentation was oddly ornate and unnecessary. In America it would have been much more blunt. Israel Jackson would come over with his fists and three boys and you would fucking pay... In Turkey there were certain social rules which had to be followed. The Turkish service industry prides itself on presentation; it is what people expect. On the sign was written $40 for a beer and $90 for a bottle of “Champagne.”

“Oh come on! We had two beers!” Sertaç guffawed. It was getting kinda funny, in a very dangerous sort of way. “We had two beers!”

The older man almost shouted at Sertaç, not a glimmer of joviality on his face, “What is it to me what you had and what you didn’t have? We are a legal institution and this is our price. If YOU can’t pay, we have big trouble.”

“Well, we want to pay,” Sertaç said, checking himself slightly. He had reached the older man’s breaking point. Perhaps the older man was only playing the bad cop routine but then where was the good cop? Real trouble was brewing and Sertaç had to calm down.

Sertaç was a very good negotiator and he knew all the ins and outs of Istanbul but he was now fucked and there was no getting around this. “You want to pay, then pay.”

“We don’t have that kind of money. I work in a sales department of a trading firm with my friend. We don’t have that kind of money.”

“How much do you have?”

“Uh, how much do you have?” Sertaç looked at me.

“70 million,” I said. 70 million TL was equivalent to about $50 US. I knew Sertaç had a lot more in his wallet.

The old man wanted to see the 70 million so I took out my wallet. He took the money and then he took my wallet from me.

As he looked through my wallet, his eyes bulged and he played with his tongue, pushing out the side of his cheek. He looked like a fucking chipmunk, the son-of-a-bitch. A dirty filthy fuck is what he was and I would have loved to belt him across the face but I was too scared for that now.

I didn’t care that he was looking through my wallet but when he came to my ATM card and took it out and looked at it in the dim lamp light, upside down, right side up like a cave man lost in thought I got nervous, “Will this work on our credit card machine?” he asked the pimp.

“I don’t think so,” said the pimp.

Minus the money the older man handed everything back to me. “Now you,” he said to Sertaç.

“I don’t have anything-”

“Ohhhh, I wanna see what you have.”

Sertaç gave him his wallet, face frozen. The older man found a nice credit card and a stashed $100 bill. “Well look at this... don’t have any money huh? Did you forget about this? Fuck, did you forget about this?” The older man looked at the pimp, “I think we should take this money and charge the remainder of the bill on this nice VISA credit card of our fine young, rich import exporter.”

“Sounds like a good idea to me.”

Sertaç put everything on one last plea, “Do you have any idea how hard I worked for that $100? Do you have any idea about my family and how they need this mone-”

“Amina koyayim your family! What’s it to me?! Amina koyayim, what is it to me how hard you ‘worked for this money.’ You came here and you made mistakes and now you can’t pay the bill and I am supposed to listen to your amina koyayim sad story. I am not a relative and I am not your father so amina koyayim what is it to me?”

“Okay, you have a point, but we really don’t have-”

“So you lied to me when you said before that you didn’t have the money. Fuck, what are we going to do with you asses? I don’t like liars and you are liars.”

“Okay we are sorry.” Sertaç reached forward and set his hand on the older man’s hand in the middle of the table. The older man had all of Sertaç’s life in a tight talon grip. “But big brother, I am sorry but we really can’t let you take the credit card. We are very sorry and we will pay you everything back but I really don’t have the money right now. Please have some mercy on us. Please.”

“Allah, allah, allah...” the older man said rolling his eyes and taking Sertaç’s wallet away. “What are we gonna do with you... idiots, idiots, idiots here in this place...”

The older man stood up and walked over to the bar and spoke in whispers to the bartender. The bartender came out from behind the bar. He was a young guy and from the moment he sat down at our table everyone knew he was the real one in charge. He was calm and seemed a lot nicer than the older prune. The young owner didn’t have any scars on his face and he looked intelligent.

“You really don’t have any more money?” he asked Sertaç. “I don’t want to have to search you.”

“No honest brother, we don’t have any more money.”

“The bill is three fifty. You gave us a hundred fifty. Tomorrow come back and give us the rest of the money. Now get the fuck out of here.” The bartender put Sertaç’s wallet on the table in front of Sertaç.

“Yeah, get the fuck out of here.” said the pimp from Adana.

Outside the bar there was a complete calm. The cobblestone of the streets and the haze of street lamps seemed untouched by what was going on inside the bar. It was a pretty contrast. We crossed the street to the car, each step feeling like a little piece of life back in us.

Sertaç was hot and angry and ashamed. His 23 year old ego had been badly bruised. He wanted to kill all of the men in the bar. He swore in English that he would someday become rich and return and kill all of the bastards who had stolen our money. He said he hated people who bumped other people on the streets without saying they were sorry and this, according to him, was just that mentality. “How can people just bump other people in the street and not politely apologize and these BASTARDS are just like THAT!!!!”

Sertaç was sometimes very young. I just listened to him.

He sped us around the coast line of the Bosphorus, out past Ortaköy, past Rum Hisari.

When he calmed down we stopped on the coast. We were far up the Bosphorus and here the weather and the water were clean and you could smell the salt from the waves slamming up against the coastline. It was windy and autumn, a perfect time in Istanbul.

The outlines of the hills and small mountains were visible on the horizon.

We walked by the coast. Sertaç felt terrible. He felt wholly embarrassed with this mistake. “I am so sorry. You are the foreigner here and I should never have made such a mistake. I feel like a stupid Anatolian villager just off the first bus. That is how well those bastards fooled me.”

He was taking all the blame. We got back in the car and began to head back to the Asian side of the city. On the way we bought wine and beer.

We began drinking. By the time we reached Üsküdar I was drunk. We got back on the Bosphorus coast (only this time in Asia) and stopped opposite Kiz Külesi. The moonlight could be seen directly from this point of the Bosphorus. Kiz Külesi, which is a famous tower in the middle of the Bosphorus, shore in an outline of sea phosphorescence.

We parked along the coast and turned the radio on load. Sertaç listened to Müslüm Gürses or Müslüm Baba, a Turkish singer of Arabesk music. He fell asleep. I walked drunk and alone away from the car.

At the small inlet on the coast of Üsküdar there is a computer guidance radio tower. It sends clicks and beeps to the passing sea tanker traffic going up and down the strait.

I was drunk and this tower felt like a 2001 movie prop. I felt like worshiping it. I thought about how lucky we had been. I couldn’t feel the luck. I was in drunken shock. I could hear the clicks and beeps very clearly in the empty night.