Nothing behaves as irrationally as a cornered beast. Believe me, I know. At the moment, I am one of them.
There are few things as dangerous as a mammal that has lost all other options and is faced with no choice other than the grim and vaguely disturbing idea of fanatically hopping a four-hour train along the coast of New England at two in the morning. To do so after twenty hours of no sleep and going the next 72 on less than three — well, there are people that would say that’s just plain stupid. And I would agree with them, if there had been any element of choice in the matter whatsoever.
It was one of those calls that you hate to get, especially late in the day after ten or twelve of those very focused hours of work where you get up and are dizzy just from rejoining reality and feeling almost human again.
I need you need to be in the office in New York at two in the morning so we can get started here in Europe on time.
Fuck. I was still in Boston at the time.
And after the four-hour train ride, and after another full bore, ten-hour work day, I still had to catch a flight to Europe.
I am now completely out of my mind. To make matters worse, the drink cart on the flight across the Atlantic has just rolled down the aisle. The New York red-eye to Amsterdam is normally packed with Dutch men and grungy boys, which means they overload on Heineken and almost nothing else. Tonight, for some inexplicable reason it’s been filled to the brim with noisy Italians and free scotch. You can see where this might go, right?
Awry.
Italian men are noisy on their own, and love nothing more than to fucking talk. Pair them up with the gambit of Slovenian women that were going to Amsterdam and the place goes all to pieces. The Italian man in the seat in front of me was singing on about what must have been futbol to the pretty blond next to him. A dude, I think, but Italians are all very pretty.
At the rate that Michelangelo or whatever was talking, the other guy might have litterally had an anyurisim had he not been Italian himself. His eyes might have swollen up with the build-up of blood from the ruptured vessel in his brain, just behind the sockets, and the veins in his neck would’ve started sinking in, pulling the skin tight around the adam’s apple and exposing the grainy texture of the malnourished cartilage. Other things happen too, and I’ve even heard of bursting capilaries at the fingertips and in and around the oral cavity. Had he been of any other nationality, things might have gotten that ugly, but thankfully Italians can ingest quite the wordcount per minute.
On the other side of the plane, about five rows back, seven or eight hollering whoops exploded when the drink cart rattled by. They went crazy on the whiskey, begging the flight attendant for more. When she tried to tell them they could only have one each they went berzerk, climbing over seats, taking the microwaved ziti marinara from the other passengers, screaming about their mothers and proposing marriage in sonnet form to random Slovenian women right in front of their husbands. It was awful. When one of the younger kids went for his football I watched as the flight attendant scurried down the aisle towards first class, covering her head and neck with her arms and screaming for mercy from the degenerates. The Slovenian girl at the window seat next to them, who couldn’t have been older than fifteen, had her feet up on the seet, her arms clutching her knees at her chest in a fetal position, rocking back and forth and mumbling something no one could hear.
Things didn’t quiet down until we passed the tropical storm we were flying over, and then they all seemed to run out of electricity and pass out. I can only stipulate that the electrical disturbances below the plane had something to do with it but that’s not based on anything other than highly skewed empirical evidence.
I missed more than half of what the Italians said, of course, but not even the blind deaf can miss the sheer volume of word output these guys produce. The levels of noise pollution alone are cause for local statutes to be put in place where severe noise disturbances can have drastic consequences. I bet no Italian man has ever heard the little safety schpiel early in the flight, which probably explains the alarmingly high statistic put out earlier this year by the FAA, wherein it was shown that 48% of deaths in airline accidents are Italian men, or men of Italian decendancy. It went on to say that the majority of Italian men who perish on flights are found in positions that suggest they were desperately trying to undue their seat-belt buckle or else leaning over to the seat next to them with their own oxygen mask in hand, either asking to put it on or else discussing the latest fashion show in Milan.
Thaese numbers are true. I absolutely did NOT make them up*. Would I lie to you?
—
And, yeah, I had plenty of scotch too, but that’s not what I’m getting at or why I’m out of my mind. I wish my craziness was due to something fun like the electrical problems of the Italians, endorphins, philosophical astrophysics, rum, or mescaline. Even scotch. But alas, it’s just rage. Pure, disgusting, over-the-top, angry, furious, unreasonable rage.
Bear with me — I started this whole thing meaning to get political but like the Italians, things got a little out of hand. Trust me, it’s better than many of the alternatives. House bill 3200: allow me — ’cause, you know, I’ve read it…
What? It was a long flight and I felt like reading some law…
First it was the town hall meetings, those already ridiculous stages wherein members or the ruling class, with the media’s help, get to look like they give two hoots of a damn about what YOU think. More on this later.
Then the town halls started getting nuts. And not, you know, normal nuts like Michelle Bachman or Orin Hatch nuts. Not Sarah Palin nuts or even Robert Bork nuts. I’m talking about people showing up at Presidential rallies armed with automatic assault weapons with shirts that indicated quite clearly what their intentions might have been and the secret service just standing there as if they had been cupcakes on parade. I’m talking about people showing up at meetings where the agenda is health care while brandishing their second amendment rights like that’s what was at stake. I’m talking about a new path being walked by the insane, the uneducated, the misinformed and the stupid of this country, and they’re being led by the same evil jerks that keep trying to bring you such debocles as the flat tax and the privatization of social security.
Now we’re seeing that there is little coincedence in all of this madness. Indeed, there is little chance of chance at all, seeing as unreasonableness has been the plan all along. Thanks to reporters and journalists who are doing real work instead of catering to the American portrait of the stupid and the lazy jackass in an easy chair listening to Fox News trash, we’ve now had painted for us a chart connecting the dots, laying the truth out in front of us as graphically as it gets. Never mind that Rachel Maddow and Keith Olberman ask questions that cater to their leftist agenda using the same formula that Bill O’Reilly uses to show his condescending and insane version of reality. Never mind that their network is indeed the left-leaning MSNBC, responsible for their own sets of idiotic stunts and ventures.
They’re still right.
See, we’re now finally dealing with FACTS, and it’ll come out in the public’s eye soon enough. It better, or the way things are going someone might get shot first. But for the first time since I can remember, it’s not just obvious — it’s provable that our society is not having a discussion about differing opinions but rather one of differing realities. Facts themselves are being debated right in front of philosophers’ eyes as they stare on in disbelief.
This is not Newtonian physics. At least half of this debate is WRONG.
And that’s important to remember when the shit hits the fan, because someone’s going to be responsible. And I don’t want to have to fish out records saying it wasn’t me, or I told you so or anything else that crass.
—
Speaking of crass, what’s her name, Betsy McCaughey, that ideology pimp who started the whole Death Panels discussion with a flick of her inarticulate tongue and a nod of her ugly face, finally found a wide-reaching audience. Again, never mind that it took a host guaranteed to be making fun of her, that was the only venue she could find that wouldn’t already be packed full of crazies and unthinking, guilt-plagued jackasses. It was all she could get at this stage in the game. On the Daily Show, trying desperately to convince anyone in the studio audience who would look at her that she had a point, Jon Stewart litterally tore her evidence from her as he tore up the rest of her argument as sheer nonsense to the applause of millions. That must have been a good day to get those free tickets, eh?
But the people in the studio didn’t have to watch the ironic Yoplait commercial at the break, the one where strawberries are dropped into the thick splash of the creamy yogurt substance, and then bounce off of it when it’s frozen. The sexy voice comes on to say their new (new? really?) yogurt can be had both ways: in the fridge as a mousse, or in the freezer as a…frozen treat. They didn’t know, I guess, what to call it. Frankly, I don’t either.
And then I realized why the whole debate is so aggrevating. Anyone who reasons at a five-year-old level can see the obvious; you just have to be paying attention in order to see it.
—
And now again, as always, the Democrats seem desperate once more because the brain tumor that took Ted Kennedy’s life might make the sixty seat majority irrelevant for another 5 months. Assuming they don’t do what the Republicans want and make it an 85 vote requirement just because, you know, they want it that way now that they’re not a barely-fifty-one majority. Not that any news outlet still making a profit even remembers the health care debate, spending a third of the day covering the location of Ted Kennedy’s body, much like Michael Jackson’s a few weeks ago. Maybe they’ll make a diamond out of his hair too, though I bet someone will find a way to make something more fitting out of Ted Kennedy. Maybe they can regrow Winston Churchill from his pubes.
What? None of that now, eh? It’s way too soon for something that ugly and I’d hate to see it derail the very thing that the old Lion stood most for, besides booze and sailing, which, as a matter of record and disclosure, I’m all for. I mean, talk about conflicting agendas, right? Here you have MSNBC, dying to promote universal health care in any way possible, going to such lenghts as actually investigating and actually reporting the evil conflicts of interest in the parties rallying against the most common-sense initiative since they repealled prohibition with the 21st amendment. And the man that fought most ardently for it, whose whole 47-year-career revolved around it, the guy whose last efforts as a senator a few days before his death included an attempt to immediately replace himself with an appointment by the Democratic Governor in order to ensure action on health care while it still has a dying breath left in it…
But, well, they’ve got to have their ratings, so forget the forged letters to government from Insurance and Coal companies purporting to be from average citizens. Never mind hidden and private funding into anti-health care initiatives coming from the very people who would lose power and wealth were such an initiative to pass…
It’s off to the hearse we go. Talk about pulling the plug on grandma, eh?
—
Christ. I still haven’t really gotten to the point of mentioning how Olberman and Maddow are right. I really did start this thing meaning to get there, to discuss the recent study done on viewership of major news stations. Fox News, whose viewers are over 90% republican and can’t find Iraq on a map or hear the insanity coming out of their own asses came in at more than MSNBC and CNN combined.
Shit. No wonder we’re in such a… ah, you finish it.
* I might have made that up.
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The left mouse button on my notebook was missing, and the other one was stuck. The rest of the right side of the keyboard was overheating right where the processor sits, whiring and coughing pathetically like a sick child at three in the morning. Typing anything that involved letters on the right half of the keyboard meant first degree burns. The drive holding two weeks of already useless work was now missing, corrupt from god-knows-what-error, making the last two weeks even more useless. To boot, the food here sucks, the economy is costing a lot of people that sit around me their very secure jobs, I’m frustrated about travel schedules I can’t make because of other people’s blunders, I’ll probably miss meeting some very important people in New York next week and all because I’m here, doing nothing for nobody.
No wonder I’m pissed.
—
In a split-second I couldn’t control, my feet exploded against the floor, throwing my torso into the air. My throat grunted a war whoop, my hands grabbed my PC and heaved it clear across the room, smashing it against the wall with a violent garble of plastic and metal being shoved against each other and uncomfortable angles. The hard plastic around the case cracked in one sharp snap that sounded like a femur splitting in two. I stood at my desk, breathing heavily, my sleeves rolled up and my top two buttons on my shirt already undone. I bared my teeth, totally out of control. A coworker was looking at me for obvious reasons and in a rage of animalistic rage I pointed at him aggressively.
“What the fuck are YOU looking at?” He and I work for the same company and I know his shitty equipment has had days of poor performance like this. “Don’t pretend like you’ve never wanted to do that with this stinking equipment they fucking give us. It’s a travesty,” I filled in the silence. The bewildered Dutch man kept looking at me silently. Dutch people don’t like scenes and it makes them uncomfortable to be thrust in the middle of one. And I’d never acted like so like the mos American person in the room.
“Besides, it’s YOUR fault,” I shouted, and pointed to the one across the table from him. “And YOUR fault, and YOUR fault,” I shouted indiscriminately, pointing to everyone in the room and making angry faces at the frightened bunch. “YOU - miserable twats put up with discomfort and wretched computer equipment and bad processes and retarded policies all because YOU don’t want to stick your neck out! YOU don’t want to be the one to make a wake, to change the color in this grey world. YOU frightened lizards that duck and stare empty-faced at every obvious conflict thrown at us from anyone higher than us. You SUCK!”
I waited a second for it to sink in, looking around the room and eyeing the door.
“YOU fucking useless inanimate objects,” I finished, throwing my hands up in a wild craze. “React, Goddamnit! Say something away from the fucking coffee machines!”
Nothing. I looked at the fattest one of the bunch and threw my mouse at the fat rolling over his waist but he recoiled like a mole. “Fuck you!” I yelled, and ran into the woods outside the building. The mouse bounced onto the floor.
—
I was furious that night when I went out for a run. Which I do when I can’t handle some of the things I hear. I’d heard of a little political story that was being kept quiet by Murdoch’s empire of media and then some, and I couldn’t find Dylan to get it off my chest. So it festered.
I’d already been losing it on the tube, in my car, even at the pub. Things were getting weird in a way you only expect during election season. The always important but continuous loser of politics, health care, was being ousted from the media waves by a combination of republican affairs scandals, the typical scurry of the appointment of a new Justice to the Supreme Court of Klowns and some inane tripe of fabricated batshit about Obama’s birth certificate that for some reason even Rachel Maddow was talking incessantly about. The intellectual property trial against a mother and student had, individually awarded record companies upwards of half a million dollars for downloading thirty-something songs. This was with a judge and jury. And everytime I re-read the article about Alberto Gonzalez and the continuing decadence of the Justice Department it struck that cord of dissonance that wishes death to those in the establishment as the only solution to getting out of this maddness that’s settling in over us.
In retrospect, I guess I should’ve known that just blowing the largest spores clean off the fungus that is our DOJ wouldn’t have done shit to stop the decay of the thing. But I just couldn’t get over it. The thick mucus of resentment that builds up in my mind when I hear enough bullshit sometimes constricts my breathing, or at least my ability to think straight. When I can’t wrap my mind around the absurdity I see and hear I tend to collapse into myself and that’s when other things, more extroverted in me, come out and the shit hits the fan.
That’s probably not what led to the the aforementioned work-related disaster but it wasn’t helping things either. Running violently into whatever jungles I happen to be inhabiting is just about the only thing I can do in times like that and I think that if it wasn’t for all the whisky, I’d be in amazing shape.
Earlier in the day I’d gotten beligerent, and yes, done horrible things to company property in front of my clients and coworkers. But so what? Let them sit in stale offices drink horse tranquilizers in the middle of the woods and slobbering figureless numbers onto their keyboards if they like, but they know I was right.
Besides, that shit felt good.
—
Later, back in my tiny hotel room I calmed down by closing the curtains, running the shower at full blast as hot as it goes and closing the bathroom door. I stripped naked and lay on the cold tile, feeling the steam of fifty degrees celcius build up in the enclosed space and fall on my face. My iPod sang Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” and wailed a bunch of Muddy Waters and my blood pressure dropped to its normal levels of 140/90.
But that was all work stuff, the very same bullshit I usually avoid mentioning here because, well, shit, you don’t care. What made it relevant enough today was not so much the fact that I’d flipped my Compaq clear across the room and just high enough to miss giving two very tall Germans very clear USB marks across their temples, though I knew at the time that scene would make for some good theatrics. What made it significant was the why of the matter — the raison d’être; I’d finally seen the invisible hand of Adam Smith at work and it was jerking off my corporate employer while the other one slapped around some very good friends of mine.
And we’ll leave it at that. There’s no way to go further into it without getting into some very thick and ugly mud and right now I just can’t find the hours in the day to get into.
Because I’d calmed down from the work thing. I wasn’t belligerent anymore, yelling things at the radio or debating healthcare policy with my TV, though I was getting there. See, politics had come on the iDesk, one of the only good shows put out by CNN, and as if it wasn’t enough that the tentacles of Alberto Gonzalez hadn’t dried up after leaving the DOJ in shame and shambles, the goddamn things were still manipulating, twisting and otherwise creeping things out.
Anyway, the story was that after months of not finding work ahead of the trail of destruction he left behind in his former job, homeschool finally landed at Texas Tech in northern Lubbock.
Yeah, I know. Imagine that — Lubbock, TX. One more for the file of “Duh”, eh?
And I tried to get over the fact that he’s going to be getting a salary of 100K (when regular full-time proffessors with real PhDs and actual experience who teach more than 15 students a semester often get half that). I tried to get over the fact that students formed groups and petitions and even facebook efforts of getting rid of this taint on their education, all of which went ignored (help ‘em out, by the way — how’d you like it if you walked into class and Richard Milhous Nixon was your teacher? Same thing. Here’s the link: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=114577517744).
I tried to get over the silence of the faculty, and later their own ineffective actions when 45 of them signed petitions that will certainly fall on deaf ears of administrators who “don’t make decisions based on petitions”.
Of course not. Not when it’s not fun for the people who pay you to play nice with them.
I even tried to get over the fact that the school’s Chancellor, Kent Hance — who considers Gonzales a “good friend” — said that he received a “substantial number” of supportive e-mails about the hire, and just nine critical ones, and then added that “he wasn’t dwelling on the negative ones because they didn’t come from loyal university donors.”
I mean, shit. I tried. But the shithead that runs that ill-fated school didn’t even bother trying to mask the ugliness of his cronyism. And it’s fucking with education. That’s where I draw the line.
————————————————————————
There.
But it’s been a bad time for idealism. It’s been a bad time for hope and optimism, at least when it comes to government and life within this system based loosely on something that was once referred to as democracy. You know, back when we didn’t know any better. Or maybe we did. They did, anyway.
So yeah, I tried. But I was already on the verge of completely freaking out, so I did the only thing that has a documented track record of success in these situations — which is not, by the way, throwing laptops. That kind of lunatic behavior is revolutionary radicalism and you should be very aware of your surroundings if you even want to think of trying that on as ‘therapy’. Besides, I’ve only tried it once so I’m not sure of the scientific soundness of the theory.
But I was furious, my reason twisted like theirs and I needed to go for a violent run. It was raining hard too, and the lightning had gone wild, which is perfect.
Yes, I’m aware of the dangers of running in lightning. I went anyway.
Trees flew past my face like spiderwebs and I couldn’t distinguish one from the other. The green faded to black, the explosion of the summer woods veiled by the night. With my hands outstretched I felt like I was floating through the leaves, and who knows where I imagined I was?
The wet rubber of my soles against the smooth pavement squeaked and gripped until it warmed up, until the steps themselves molded with their environment. My feet were marching drums in synch with themselves. I could almost hear the trumpets of war over the heavy shield of the thick trees, over the hills that approached but never arrived until they were right underfoot. A steady rumble in the dark clouds above was in consonance with the heavy drops that already splashed over my cheeks, blurring my vision as I ran. I shook my head and the water drained from my face only to build up again in a few seconds.
But I ran.
My pace quickened, the steps growing louder. The path ahead of me was hard to see in the dark but it seemed to stretch to a point at infinity. It excited the hell out of me and I ran wildly into that green blackness. I thought I was alone but between what I thought were drums in the distance there seemed to be cars. The dim semblance of approaching headlights would appear between the bushes ahead and I turned away, onto another path. I tried to run deeper into the thick dark, avoiding as much knowledge as I could of the world outside myself, outside those woods, that rain.
But the deeper I ran, the more often came the headlights in the distance, the more of them there were; the closer they seemed. I turned to run in the opposite direction, but no thinning of that evil-tempered traffic could I find. They were coming from all sides, at all speeds, violently stripping the forrest of its solitude, of its haven. I stopped running.
I just stood there, and marveled at the traffic I could not escape.
—
I feel you don’t really know a city until you’ve run it in the rain, and this I’ve done in many places. Brooklyn, Geneva, Brasilia, Amsterdam, Oslo, London, Vienna — in the rain, through empty streets, void of the bullshit and other distractions there is more intimacy with a place. In the wet dark of a violent storm, there are thoughts you dare to think that normally would stay shut away in twisted crevaces of the mind, untampered with. You notice things you’d otherwise miss, like the echo under a stone bridge while your trainers seem muffled underfoot. You run into things that would otherwise not be there, like the lit up eyes of stray dogs, giving you looks full of evil and insanity, quite aware.
Fields of fireflys aglow in the downpour, flexing god-knows-which-muscles. It seems a lie.
No, I haven’t hit the rum yet. But maybe I should. Rum’s good.
Speaking of which, I’m glad I enjoyed that last bottle of Jack Daniels, because it’ll be my last. No, no, I haven’t quit drinking or found Jesus or anything crazy like that…it’s just that I recently heard they donated over twenty million dollars to the Bush campaign. Sure, I heard that from an English comedian in New York, and yes, the entire liquor industry probably leans toward “Republican Leanings”. And though the Dems aren’t any better when it comes to being friendly to business before being responsible and accountable to the people, it’s silly to base a political opinion on this little — oh, what the hell, let’s call it a fact — everyone else does it.
But this whole rant has been about cognitive dissonance, hasn’t it? And just to illustrate the point of how well esconsced in the matter we are, I’ll be giving up that particular Tennesee Whiskey. And I’ll be getting my inspirations elsewhere, thanks.
Isn’t that just the bitch about the truth? It comes out in the end, doesn’t it? It may be late, it may be stretched thin and pale from being hidden in deep places inside the human-sized safes in old men’s closets and offices. But it comes out.
And you’d think cognitive dissonance would be unpleasant enough to be a deterrent, or obvious enough to be a detergent, but no. The evolutionary abilities of men with power based in the establishment to rise above that most basic and inconvenient of human traits is quite incredible.
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Oscar and I sat in the back of a shisha lounge called Green Light Cafe. The bar was tripped out and smoked in, a hopeless scene of smokers from all walks of life, not a one of them local, which meant no Dutch people.
Don’t get me wrong, you know — Dutch people and I have a lot of things in common and I esteem their practicality and straightforwardness. It’s just that, hell — I needed a fucking break from the freaks of blunt.
And for that I was thankful. In that pillow-covered hole of wall to wall carpeting and blue and green and yellow and red neon floating on the ceiling there were no Dutch people. Not even the barkeep, who alternates on different nights from being a beautiful and petite Thai girl and a chunky English douchebbag.
Worlds, man.
The music there is usually a mellow kind of Jazz remix that seems to have engaged in acts of coitus with punk rock and steel drums. The chilled out clientele — overeager Erasmus young’ns, dreadlocked white guys, hippie chicks and Israeli stoners — always in character. They’re all straight off the train, backpacks and all. Haven’t even found their hostels yet.
I watched Oscar blow elegant smoke rings from the shisha pipe we shared. The man’s been everywhere and when he says he learned to blow smoke rings in the Middle East, motherfucker means Mecca, man. Or, at least as close to it as non-Muslims can get.
“Jeddah is the coastal port on the Red Sea, just outside of Mecca,” he informed me after seeing the blank stare on my face. He seemed surprised by my ignorance and I snapped out of it.
“I know where it fucking IS, Oscar. I’m just contemplating what a fucking cool job you have that by the sheer will of the mind, you can, on certain weekends, decide to just hop on a plane into the port of Jeddah and smoke enough shishas alone on the edge of the Red Sea until you learn to blow smooth smoke rings that smash calmly into the ceiling.”
He dragged the pipe a bit, and still took a second deep breath, exhaling slowly, as if his soul was leaving his body through his mouth. “You know, man, this job…it’s great. But it’s not as great as you think.”
“How do you know what I think, Oscar,” I said, with a spritzy tone in my voice that I hadn’t intended. He wasn’t annoyed.
“I’m telling you that this job has its curses and isn’t for everybody. Especially if you have specific needs.” I nodded, my head in my hands, showing him how bored I was with that topic I’d heard so often, so many times before.
Still, the man has been everywhere, it seems. But I knew that there are two roads to Mecca: one that actually goes to the city and one that goes around it, for foreigners or non-Muslims that think they can see Mecca just because they’ve traveled for god-knows-how-long? Nope, they’ll put you back in your blistering car and send you off. Everyone has their own problems.
He tightened his lips and thought for a moment, eventually saying, “Yeah. That was an interesting weekend. What a fucking shit country, that is, though.”
“What do you mean,” I asked, reaching for my pint of Heineken. “You told me you went from an air-conditioned Marriott — with a pool, which you swam in quite enjoyably, to hear you tell it — to a beach-side restaurant to smoke and watch the sunset and then the next day you took a drive to the sandy penninsula to search for a boat and ended up meeting a bunch of Dutch guys on the docks…”
“First of all, exactly. I went to Saudi-fucking-Arabia and who do I meet there, as if I didn’t have enough of that around this town of lunatics? The Dutch. I don’t see what you see in these people, honestly.”
“In my defense, I’m not all that happy with them either,” I said, looking around and smiling. I’m pretty sure I let that little gem slip every now and again. You should pay more attention.” He hesitated.
“Anyway,” he said, “it was shit. The town lists TGIFriday’s, Chilli’s and Pizza Hut among their top ten restaurants. People who go there return with pictures of their standard rooms at the Hilton, of unimpressive statues, some sunsets and occasionally, sidewalks.”
“I can picture,” I said, “the kind of people that take pictures of their hotel rooms at the Hilton. Clear as day, right?”
He furrowed his brow at me and took a deep drag of the pipe. “You mean people from the midwest?” he asked, holding it in. Then he blew another elegant masterpiece that grazed my left ear.
“Never mind,” I mumbled, grinning.
He went on. “And did I tell you that when I was about to sit at the restaurant where I smoked that shisha — by the way, it wasn’t beach-side, it was water-side; they don’t have beaches in Jeddah. There are some stretches by the highway that hug the water that are lined with large rocks to muffle the waves, but definitely no beaches.”
“ANYways…” I said, suggestively.
“Right. Did I tell you that at that restaurant I had to sit on the second floor, away from the water because the section — the empty section, I should say — of seats by the water is reserved for family seating? No single men allowed.” He seemed happy to have gotten that off his chest.
“Really?” I asked. I knew that Saudis segregated their men and women, but I figured there was space to move or something.
“Single men,” he repeated, “are the lowest fucking rungs on their social ladder.” He folded his arms and leaned back into his chair, his long, curly black hair bouncing on his head. I was surprised no one in Saudi had ever suspected he was Jewish. In any case, he was very satisfied with himself for that story.
“Yeah,” I sighed. “I remember when you told me of those boys on that lawn in Riyadh one time and how the police chased them down…”
“But they let me go,” he reminded me, “when the bell boy came out to explain I was a foreigner in the hotel.”
“An expensive hotel?” I asked him.
“The most ridiculous thing I’ve ever stayed in,” he said, which is saying a lot. “In the Egyptian Marble shower I could lie flat on my back and roll away from the showerhead, rolling five times before I hit the other wall. I know this for a fact. I had enough space to do cartwheels in that suite.”
“That explains why the guard didn’t give you a hard time then, right?” I offered.
“Right,” he said. “But that’s not the point. The point is that single men, especially young ones, are scum, the lowest class.”
“Why do you think that is,” I asked, suddenly kind of seriously pondering the reason.
“Honestly? I think it’s society’s way of projecting their own self-hatred onto something. I mean, I just can’t reason with the notion that separating men and woment results in anything other than repressed sexual urges. Just look at the Catholic Church.”
“Mmmm,” I nodded, and it felt like he was on a roll, so I didn’t say anything.
“I think that somewhere deep within them where human needs can’t be touched by silly rules, religious or otherwise, there is at least the faintest whisp of a wish that those men didn’t need for marriage to be their highest priority in order to escape the social hell it puts them all in. A kind of a obtuse logic: single men cannot be in the presence of or seen with a woman to whom they are not related. Deep within people must find this repressing and wish it weren’t so. And if all single men were married, they would not have this problem. Therefore, single men are frowned on.”
I looked at him in awe. “Oscar, that was, by far, the craziest thing you’ve said tonight. And that’s following your story of rolling on the floor in the shower in your hotel room in in Riyadh.”
“I know,” he said, half-ignoring me, sort of beside himself for nailing a thought like that down. And then his face lit up. “And what about the Catch-22 of how a boys meets a girl?” he asked excitedly. “Have I told you about that?”
I shook my head no and reached for my beer.
“I had been wondering –” he explained, “after being in that country for 2 months with no alcohol, cheap gas and nothing but sand and flat land around me, how it was that people could, in the 21st century, still go along with the notion of arranged marriages.”
I nodded again, and sipped my beer. He dragged the pipe again and let the smoke pour out of his mouth slowly, like a waterfall. That fucking guy.
“So I did what I normally do when I want a straight answer,” he said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
He smiled, and blew the dense smoke off the table in front of him. “I ask a cab driver,” he said, pursing his lips and raising his eyebrows. Fucking Oscar.
“And?” I demanded.
“And…” he dragged it out, “he told me that when parents won’t look away or pretend that they don’t know what’s going on, what the kids do is go down to the shopping mall with their mobile phones…”
“Mobile phones?” I interrupted.
“Yeah. He said what they do is set the Bluetooth receiver on the phone to be discoverable and when they find a phone they like they start texting and chatting with them. If the kids hit it off, they agree on a meeting place and a way to feign either marriage or relations for long enough to be seen in public before they become engaged.”
I was stunned. “Was he lying?” I asked, only half-kidding.
“No,” Oscar said. “I did this in a mall in Riyadh once and used my Bluetooth thingy to search for other discoverable devices. What came up was sort of sad.” I tried to sip my beer, realizing that I was sipping an almost totally empty glass. “A list of at least 30 or more phones came up. Their names were mostly illegible, but there were some with names like ‘Sexy, Sixteen and Single’ and ‘Ready for love, boy’.”
“Yikes.”
“That’s what I thought,” he said. “Look, the pool was nice and all, but talk about a vast emptiness… I mean — who pays for all that gold trim?” he asked. I shrugged in agreement. He continued.
“In Jeddah, after wandering around the immediate neighborhood and finding nothing to do I finally found someone who understood enough English to be cajoled into telling me something, even if it was to give up hope. Those are the stakes.”
“Yeah?” I asked. I was partly distracted by the young Israeli kid rolling a joint of hash next to us.
“Yeah,” Oscar said. “This young Jordanian manager at the Marriott, when I badgered him enough about WHAT TO DO there he sort of lowered his voice and lowered his shoulders, leaning in to talk to me. He said, ‘listen, I’m a foreigner trapped here too. None of them will tell you but I’ve been here for two years and all there is to do is go to the mall.”
“I wonder why,” I said out loud, with a grin.
“‘Nonesense,’ I said to him, sort of startled by his honesty. ‘There must be a café where you can go read a book by the sea, right? These people are pious to a fault but they can’t be averse to a good life.’ I decided. He cast a look that told me he was not getting through to me.
‘It’s worse than you think,’ he said.
‘It can’t be,’ I countered. He smiled.
‘You’ve been to Riyadh?’ he asked me.
‘I’ve just come from there,’ I told him. ‘I’m here for the weekend’.
‘What do you think of Riyadh?’ he asked.
‘It sucks,’ I told him. ‘That’s why I came here. At least there is ocean here, right?’ I have him a smile. He smiled back but it was more wishful than it was agreement.
‘Look, the only thing the ocean adds to in Saudi Arabia is humidity.’
My heart sank for a moment. ‘That’s ridiculous. You’re telling me that there is nothing to do in Jeddah except either pay $250 for an hour for a wave runner or else drink tea in the hotel lobby all afternoon by yourself? Why are there even hotels in this place? Why are you people here?’
He adjusted in his seat and a grave feeling dripped all over his face. ‘I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you. I think I understand what you want. You won’t find it here.’”
—
“And that,” Oscar said, “was the greatest reaction I’d gotten there, by far. By FAR.
—
His circles of smoke glided over the pages I was reading in the dim light, casting strange shadows and faint shapes over HST’s words. I struggled with my crude attempts at such cool manufacturings and eventually just gave up, sucking it all down and expelling it forcefully towards the dark blue ceiling.
It tasted like apples.
—
A long-haired blonde down the bar continued to throw suggestive glances at Oscar while shaking her shoulders in time with the mad noise the DJ was making. He glanced up from his writing every now and again to return them. I got the unshakable feeling he was playing some kind of game but I wasn’t a part of it.
He was deep in thought and I had just taken a deep inhale of the pipe when I saw her, out of the corner of my eye, get off her barstool looking over in our direction. I panicked and looked across the street at the signed bolted to the next building. It read, fortuitously, “Obstakel“. I knew exactly what it meant.
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Stop me if you’ve heard this one.
The kitten hadn’t seemed to like me from the moment I entered my new flat. It was already there and I’d assumed it belonged to the girl who was to be my new flatmate. She was in the kitchen cutting squash when I arrived but she had two guests who were in the living room rolling joints and sucking strips of acid.
Great, I thought. This should be fun.
The apartment was one of the highest I’d been on, but it had a shitty view of Queens and the the Throgs Neck Bridge out to Long Island. Nothing worth describing because it doesn’t matter in this dream. It was just a flat expanse of grey and brown, with that weird hint of blue that happens when it’s slightly overcast and the cloud cover is meek enough that it hints at the colors of the sky above. Whatever.
Anyway, that fucking cat was freaking me out, leaving the room whenever I entered, then coming close for a stroke and fleeing before I even moved to do it. I’m not a cat person anyway and mistrust everything they do from motives to actions, but this was, after all, a kitten. I couldn’t imagine that its instincts for deceit and it’s capacity for treachery were developed enough to screw with me like that.
I introduced myself to the two men in the living room. One of them, a white haired man in his forties or fifties looked up from what he was painting and smiled eagerly as he looked up at me. He had terrible teeth, yellowed and crooked and was miserably unshaven. He said hello with a liverpudlian accent and seemed basically normal, but then said almost nothing else the entire time. He seemed terribly withdrawn, almost fearful of what might happen next, but he continued painting. The other one had fallen backward off his chair and was writhing on his back, making yelping noises like a strange porpoise. His face was red and I knew I was dealing with a dope fiend. But for now he seemed harmless and I stepped over him to go into the kitchen.
“Eeeee, eeee!” he said as I did so.
She had long strawberry blond hair that was familiar and warm. Her pale face was empty and small, but she had a sweet voice when she welcomed me.
“Those things are impossible to cut,” I told her, which was true. But she paid no attention and kept hacking away at the squash with a knife that was thin and long. I put my things down and walked back out to the living room. The two guests were gone and the kitten was in the middle of the room, now bare of any furniture or decoration. I took a step towards the little cat.
It screeched and lept straight up in the air, right at eye level and hissed on it’s way down.
“Aaah!” I shouted, “what the hell is wrong with you, you evil bastard?” It ran to the wall and I followed, bent low to the ground, trying the calm the thing down. But it was freaking the fuck out, dashing from wall to corner, from wall to wall, hissing and leeping, seemingly trying to evade me.
I couldn’t understand it.
As suddenly as it had started, the kitten stopped in a corner and looked at me with careful eyes. The apartment was still. A moment passed and it licked its paw. I stood looking at it.
Then for no reason on this Earth it attacked my face and removed something from my head. I watched it land on the other side of the bare and brightly lit room with something on its face.
“My glasses!” I started, surprised because I don’t wear glasses — except, you know, when it’s both a dream or an interesting literary device. The cat darted around me and into the kitchen, where I could hear the muffled sounds of an excited conversation through the walls of the living room. I followed the cat into the kitchen, grabbing the machete I saw sitting over the refridgerator.
Shut up — it’s my dream.
When they noticed me walking in with a cold two-foot blade the width of a butcher knife and pointing it at the kitten with rage in my eyes, they fell silent. I explained that it took my glasses and I saw the kitten under the table, wearing them, the little fucker. It would’ve been hilarious if I hadn’t been disturbed by it at the time.
“Why not?” said the dope fiend. “And you must get it back from the beast. You cannot trust these animals.”
“Right,” I said, and heard a noise rustling behind me. “Aagh!” I shouted, kicking the chair folded against the wall behind me in that barest of kitchens. “Did you hear that?” I asked them. “What the hell was that?”
“Never mind that now,” the fiend said, calmer now and in control. “You have to calm down…just get your thing. And, uhh, don’t listen to what these people say.” He pointed to the girl and the silent Brit, his deep voice making me nervous and confused.
I walked slowly toward the cat, trying to keep the blade pointed at it and steady with a neutral expression on my face. Cats can sense fear and anxiety and they want no part of it, I’ve found.
With light feet and a precise thrust I managed to slide the blade underneath the feline’s paws and it froze in place. I flicked the machete and the kitten flew across the room. I looked over at the two maniacs on the table, one casting paint blotches of paint on the kitchen wall and the other smoking frantically as he covered the table with menacing words. They stopped for a second and looked at me, some more surprised than others.
“Too much?” I asked them, the machete still in my hand, but I woke up before they responded.
–
You know those times when mothers tell you to get enough sleep?
You should listen to them.
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At the moment I am on my 37th hour of perpetual consciousness following an all-nighter of every museum in Amsterdam and then a red-eye to Madrid. I am sitting at the tiny hotel desk scribbling this note frantically while outside the night is slowly turning to dawn. It’s 5:10 in the morning and decent people are not awake, which is why I am still writing and not running to save my life. A shit storm is about to blow the windows of this room.
I want to get this down fast because I don’t have a lot of time before I have to get out of here. It won’t take long to pack, since all I have on me are the clothes on my back a couple of notebooks, a novel I’ve already read and a violin case with a cheap Chinese fiddle inside. I don’t know why I’m bothering with the violin; it’s not like I play the damn thing. But it’s a perfectly good fiddle and it did cost someone about a hundred euros. My laptop broke down a couple days ago so I didn’t bother dragging it out to Madrid. They lost the rest of my luggage somewhere between Amsterdam and Munich so at least it’s their problem now. I won’t have to carry anything and will just have to figure out how to find it later. With any luck I can get them to ship it straight to me, though not at this hotel… not anymore.
What I could use right now is a little more time and some clarity - I need to think. But I can do that on my way out of here, I guess, which needs to be soon. I could also use a map of the city marking police stations and cheap hotels and perhaps some deodorant. All of these items are, by the way, in my lost bag which is in the capable hands of the Lufthansa ground staff at the Munich regional airport for some inexplicable reason.
The issue of the moment is that they’ve messed up my hotel reservations here and I’ll have to be leaving a day earlier than I’d planned, which is a hassle and and normally they would be forcing me out of the hotel this morning to make room for another paying guest. Normally I’d also get until 10 or 11 am before I had to leave; the typical check out time. But not now.
No, Christmas will come much sooner this year for the strong-armed Spanish bell boys of the NH hotel in Madrid. Those kids will have to do more than just carry luggage today. When they come to check me out of the hotel they’ll be wanting more than just my credit card and signature and if I’m still here I am not going to enjoy it.
God, it’s going to be messy: when they walk into the reception area today and see the bar reduced to shattered martini glasses and peanuts strewn with the shards all over the floor they’re going to have a suspect on their minds and that suspect is going to bear a very strong resemblance to the man in room 403.
I am that man.
There will be a lot of explanations requested and reimbursement required and I want no part in either. I’m a busy man and become very frustrated by having to explain why the bar is destroyed with peanuts on a Tuesday morning, especially this early. And that may be just the best-case scenario, the civilized scenario - and I’m not counting on it. This is, after all, Spain, a nation of hard-headed Catholics, Moorish-Visigoths who run with bulls and stomp on wood. They are people who see ripping the necks off of geese and using the sinewy toughness to slide down a foxline over a lake as a constructive way to pass the time on a Sunday. What they will do with me here, I can’t imagine.
–
I couldn’t sleep last night after 4 am. It happens often, especially in my line of work and it’s not altogether a healthy thing, but what the hell? I didn’t decide to be what they call a road warrior for the health of it. I had wandered downstairs, hoping to sneak into the breakfast buffet and get some carbohydrates in me while I read from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slapstick. When I found the place locked and not a soul in the reception to help, I sat at the bar in the hall between the breakfast buffet and the reception desk. The bar was relatively small, mirrored and had several shelves of glasses and only a few with bottles.
The peanut jar was open so without thinking, I grabbed a handful and lined them up on the bar. I started flicking them at the mirror for no reason other than that’s what seemed like the right thing to do to peanuts that are lined up. Like anxious foot soldiers they stood at attention on a bar at four in the morning. I would aim at the bottles that jumped out at me, the blue Bombay Sapphire, the green Tanqueray, the yellow label on the Cutty Sark, and whatever marketing splash Absolut recently dreamed up.
When I hit the first glass and knocked it off the shelf, it very naturally smashed on the floor into a thousand little pieces. I was certain it would have awoken half of the hotel or at least someone who would care enough to storm into that hallway to find out what animal had gotten into the bar and chase it away with a mop. I was sure they’d be shocked but I was also paranoid - as I said, I haven’t slept much in the last two days.
I didn’t hear loud and fast footsteps headed towards me right away with Spanish calls of “what the hell are you doing, you fiend?”, but I grabbed a bottle of Contreau just the same, reasoning that it would do some good damage with it’s hard angles and rectangular corners, should it come to that. I waited by the desk at the reception, crouched below eyesight and thought up all kinds of stories I could use before I had to get violent.
But nothing happened. Nobody had been disturbed by the shattering and I started thinking of pushing my luck. After a short time I went back and lined up a whole slew of them on the bar, my troops ready and willing. At first I flicked them indiscriminately, more out of anger and spite, content in my knowledge that I had time to flick the peanuts and surprised by my own impulse and unwavering hate, bent on lashing out at a hotel bar in a very dark part of the night. But then I started getting efficient, choosing more solid peanuts, kernels with both halves or else the ones with a slight curve underneath so that I could get my finger under it and provide enough lift to hit the top shelf.
Before long I had improved my aim down to bottle caps and just above the center of gravity of the martini glasses. I was mindlessly destroying the place. It only took about 10 minutes of fun to lay it all to waste. Not complete destruction, mind you, but certainly beyond cheap repair. I’m normally not a violent person but this morning I was pushed over some line for some reason; the feeling was genuine. It lacked a plan, a coherent line of thought, but not enjoyment. This was a truly twisted act that would cause someone a lot of work, a lot of grief, some debt and perhaps some anger, and the worst part about the whole affair is how much I liked it.
–
I think that I could explain where the desire for hopeless violence came from, especially given their attitude towards kicking me out when the mistake was theirs. I could rationalize it with the fact that I resented being kicked out of their hotel before I was good and ready to leave. But I couldn’t justify the destruction of their bar. That was an act of irresponsible malice that normally should have no business in a civilized society and anyone crazy enough to actually do such a thing should probably be locked up and guarded by rottweilers.
Wait. Whoops. Did I say that?
Well - in any case. It sure felt good.
But as I said, I don’t have a lot of time and soon some poor Peruvian woman will walk into the hotel to vacuum and dust and sweep before the actual staff arrives. Her usual routine will be torn when she sees the disaster this place is in and begins to fear the attackers are still on the premises, which I hope to God that I’m not. She will be filled with confusion, make the motion of the cross on her chest and mumble out a prayer of some kind. But with any luck she’ll snap out of it and start with the vacuuming, getting most of the peanuts, thereby erasing the evidence of my presence down to shards of glass, perhaps seen as a common break-in. They won’t discover that there’s nothing missing but the broken glasses for at least a couple of hours and by then I think I can be at another hotel across town where these guys will give up on me. Madrid is a very large place.
There an obvious lesson in this, but it applies more to them than to me. That lesson is to never leave the bar open with the peanuts out. I’m pretty sure it can be metaphorically applied to a great many situations.
Madrid, Spain — November 2007
Alberto Aguillera NH, Room 403
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