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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The nighttime is still full of dark things, as always. Stirrings in the unseen blackness between walls and windows, silence among the trees — these are natives to the soil of the night. Through the leaves and a light mist I can see dim lights that don’t fully penetrate the canopy. I hear strange, elusive songs that howl in a distant direction. Time has passed, too much time. Yet these things never change. I like it. Still.
–
The reports of my death are greatly exagerated, I should tell you. Not to mention that I’ve always wanted to say that.
But seriously. If that’s what you’ve heard, you’ve been misinformed. I myself heard it from an IT specialist on the outskirts of Amsterdam. Which was weird.
It was unnerving to hear — to say nothing of having an argument with — a perfect stranger about your current status as a living being. He insisted I was dead, the story being that I’d perished needlessly along with the other passengers on that Air France flight from Rio.
“Why would I be in Rio?” I asked him. “I have absolutely NOthing I want to do in Rio.”
He dodged and I lunged and eventually we came to an understanding. But I had to insist, and that’s usually when things get ugly. Thankfully, he just fixed my hard drive problem and I got out of there and went back to New York.
There’s been a lot of that lately, this business of crossing the Atlantic once a week for months on end. It’s becoming routine, almost. Sure, the miles pile up and the whiskey is free, but who cares? I have plenty of whiskey at home. And anyone who’s ever flown across the Atlantic, especially anyone who has flow over the damn thing four times in a week knows that it does terrible things to the human body. There is no way around that.
Laura and I had had a good week in Iceland just before all of this got underway so it started off on the right foot with some camping, hiking, subzero temperatures and landscapes that defy any existing means of description that I’m aware of. Once I had switched into professional mode I made the best of it, taking weekends as they came, when I had them, to meet up with the right people in the right places. Paul was working in Paris at the time and did the right thing by taking a train to Rotterdam where I picked him up and we drove to Berlin. The next weekend Laura did a similarly right thing by flying to Zurich, where I met up with her and we had ourselves a proper Swiss weekend, followed the next weekend by a proper Belgian weekend. That’s how I make the best of this situation. And that’s alright.
But as you can imagine, it was somewhere between Bruges, Zurich and Berlin that I started to lose my bearings once again. Fleeing to the US had done me little good. After over four months of attempted residence in the heart of hearts I had started to feel safe, far from their grip and the beckoning of my whining clients.
Foolish.
When you’re this good at something, there will always be someone willing to pay you to not give it up. I learned that with a few carrots and the yank of thier chain, after which they got me right back to where I’d been when I fled.
Which is how I found myself again in the center of the old city in Amsterdam at the Haven van Texel, an old favorite thinking spot of mine. It was a typical summer night in the Dutch capital, tourists floundering about and locals ignoring them the way they do so well. Neither tourist nor local, at the edge of a large umbrella I sipped a thin beer under a heavy air. The split pea soup is pretty good too, but that’s not part of the scene.
In the late evening the whole sky had come down over Amsterdam and afterwards, the rain having passed, the atmosphere had become dense and thick. The waiters walked around with a dripping wet rag, wiping whole puddles off of tables. People need to drink, after all.
In this scene I sat, as I said, sipping my thin beer, watching the boats round the curve at the Oudezijds Achterburgwal gracht while I got back to some basics with Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. I’d always suspected that American history was rooted in some shady stories but I didn’t know the half of it, it seems. Will Hunting was right; that book will knock you on your fucking ass.
But the boats — they kept passing, the curves never seeming to run out of them. A small one meandered ’round the bend and stopped at an inconspicuous doorway at the water level with no lights on. I wondered what they were doing there, in that dark corner out of sight that only only ducks and villains even notice. A place where people vanish into the night. Strange things happen in these places, right before our eyes. Sights and symbols are everywhere and it’s up to us to turn away and let them happen.
Which is exactly what I did. I don’t need the extra stress, man.
—
The uncertainties and pressures of the path I’ve been walking for the better part of this last year are out of sight. Politics doesn’t begin to describe it. I’m still waiting on a gaggle of statute of limitations so you’ll pardon the lack of specifics, but it’s a doozy. Suffice to say that it involves a lot of very roundabout language, 24-7 monitoring of all communications on every channel and of course, a LOT of air travel. The amazing thing is that it’s working well when I’m amazed it’s working at all.
The gist of it is this: I’ve been working in what equates to a pressurized bee-hive. Deadlines loom and crumbling deliverables are demanded as if Jesus had just walked out of the desert. Meanwhile, touchy topics like layoffs and salary reductions fly unchecked through people’s inboxes and nobody know’s what’s going to happen. Like some half-mad badger in a paper cage they keep me under the guise of effectiveness, skill and track record, but I know better. Some cheap executive type upstairs in a building far from any I occupy is covering his ass like red on a baboon. Sooner or later, when the walls of irreconsilable confusion come down and the barbarians come rushing in shouting for actual credentials I exepect to see the nail end of a finger protruding out of a very expensive suit.
That’s kind of a typical day for me, I guess. I hear I’m not alone but I sure as hell don’t see it. You people do a hell of a job hiding shit like that.
—
Later that night, darkness continued to fill the space as the early signs of midnight called for the sun to set sometime after 10. Amsterdam is farther north than most people realize and in late June the place sometimes feels a bit like Oslo with the canals of Venice and the heavy air of Florida. Without, you know, the Cubans.
Just kidding. There are plenty of Cubans here.
Glowing windows in the dark raise questions and stir desires. What’s in there? And who? What are they doing? And could I do it better? I’m no longer able to distinguish fear from anxiety, politics from causality. Things start to fall apart.
The banjo blues still play in my head and my eyes wander the scenes looking for a grip, a handle — something to help it all along the way. There used to be a fine line that dictated equilibrium for me, between alcohol and sleep. That balance was maintained, day in and day out. Who knows where it’s gone to now?
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Last week, standing in a tree on a ziplining platform forty feet above the St. Lucian rainforest, I let my mind drift between the chopping winds of the Atlantic Ocean and the calm waters of the Caribbean Sea.
“Would it be at all funny,” I asked Laura, “for some American stand up comedian to do a bit on carbon dioxide and deforestation?”
“On what planet,” she leered, “would that be funny?”
“I was thinking something along the lines of American attitudes. You know, ‘we’re producing all this CO2 and the trees are the ones benefiting,’ kind of a thing. Then they’d say something about cutting down more trees to discourage the trees from using so much of the CO2 we produce. Like, ‘that’ll learn ‘em‘. Could that be funny?”
She looked at me for few seconds, and as she started shaking her head the guide pushed her off the platform. She let out a short yelp of surprise and careened on the zipline down to the next tree while I felt a breeze wind its way through my sweaty helmet. The vibrating sound of the zipline faded out over the forest canopy until I could hear the birds again. Then they strapped me in and I followed, flinging myself out into the jungle.
Not a week later now, back in the city and hounded by taxes, car commercials and obnoxious ringtones, I’m faced with the raw and brutal truth of reality; that embarassing fist in the gut that explodes in your throat when you think you’re in the middle of telling a savage joke but it turns out that there is no joke. You’re living it.
–
“It’s plant food,” Rep. John Shimkus said at a House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment. “So if we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere?”
No way, I thought. I was just kidding. And besides, when I said ‘comedian’, I certainly wasn’t thinking of the House of Representatives as a Monday night comedy club.
…though, now that I just wrote that it occurs to me, why not?
Rep. Shimkus (R-IL) is among the many half-mad greedheads that try to argue that the United States doesn’t need a cap-and-trade system to limit CO2 emissions in the atmosphere. Frankly, cap-and-trade is not my tag line — I’m alright with just ‘cap’. But as an issue, my general position on it is that we have bigger fish to fry.
In any case, I was struck dumb by the terrible babbling that continued. Is it possible that this cheap clown on television is just that ignorant and stupid? Or is it the usual evil, pushing through a failing agenda, even at the cost of common decency?
Is there any way to know? Can we continue to laugh, or was Mohammad Ali right when he said, “there are no jokes. The Truth is the funniest joke of all”?
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“That’s a great book,” said the dark haired stranger sitting across the hall. Dylan looked up from his copy of I, Claudius, literally holding together its three distinct parts by the binding that had all but fallen apart. Robert Graves would have shrieked in panic to see his masterpiece as loosely bound as if it had spent a New York winter on the windowsill over a radiator.
“Yeah,” Dylan said, not wanting to stir too much conversation, and tried to go back to his reading of the Roman imbecile.
“Robert Graves is a bit effusive with his plot, though,” continued the stranger. “I trust historical fiction much more to the capable hands of Gore Vidal than the verbose rantings of an English poet, know what I mean?”
Dylan heard banter but he didn’t look up. “He’s a doozy, alright,” he said, with a hushed exhale that reeked of gin to the old lady sitting on his left of the waiting room bench. He tasted it in his own breath, even at eleven in the morning.
Who cares? he thought. I’m a freelance political columnist and I’ve been up writing about horrible things since 2 in the afternoon yesterday. Of course I reek of gin.
“You here to see Mr. Rabban?” The black-haired man asked, interrupting him a third time. Dylan looked up this time and brought his book to his lap. The vinyl chairs made a lot of noise when he moved so he wasn’t in the mood for any unnecessary shifting in the cramped heat of that dingy basement in the Lower East Side. He answered softly, hoping it wouldn’t go beyond meaningless chit chat.
“Aren’t we all?”
“I guess,” the stranger replied, thrusting his chin down and his shoulders up like Dylan had asked him the most bizarre question. “Short stories?” the guy added.
“Freelance political commentator,” Dylan fired back, still holding his book open. It seemed they were both there to see the same person, but for different reasons.
“Nice,” said the stranger, “no competition, then.” Dylan nodded.
“Are you from around here?” the stranger asked, sitting back in his vinyl bench now, making all kinds of ugly squawking noises. Dylan cringed a bit.
“I’m from a lot of places,” Dylan responded, seeing that this was going to go on until they called out his name to see Mr. Rabban, the editor of the small magazine based out of a basement office in the East Village that he was there to showcase his articles, hoping for a staff position.
“Anywhere in particular?” The guy asked.
“I don’t really like to talk about it,” Dylan said. “I’m a man without a country.” The guy across the way smiled a coy smile.
“That must serve you well as a political commentator,” he said.
“Of course” Dylan said.
“Never seeming biased - it must be a good thing for unbiased commentary.” the stranger said.
“Yeah,” Dylan thought for a moment, “I guess it is. I don’t know. I’ve never given it much thought why I don’t like to talk about it but that must be close to it, I guess.”
He thought some more.
“I’m always moving around so much. I think I just never had a chance to call anywhere home, and I’m not sure I have much of a yearning for it. Quite the opposite, actually,” he finished.
“I know just what you mean,” the stranger said. They looked at each other for a moment, Dylan checking out the stranger’s handbag at his feet and the stranger looking down at Dylan’s, both wondering what this other guy had to say for real…
“Dylan Cormack,” the secretary’s voice could be heard resonating through the hallway. Dylan arranged his things and got to his feet, the stretching vinyl making ugly sounds.
“Good luck, mate,” the stranger said from his seat.
“Cheers,” Dylan replied.
–
The door opened in Tor Rabban’s office, the weather stripping on the bottom of the door rubbing against the short carpet the whole way. Dylan Cormack walked in and stood motionless for a moment, taking in the editor’s decor.
“Have a seat,” Mr. Rabban said, motioning to the only other chair in the cramped room. The desk was an old one, made of sheet metal and reminiscent of the computer labs at Dylan’s old university. Something definitely out of NASA from the 70’s, when pencil sharpeners were still bolted to office walls. There was no decoration on the bare white walls save for the gold-plated plaque with Arabic inscribing, which Dylan had never learned to read. The off-green desk offered most of the color in the windowless room aside from the calendar of cats sitting by the door and still turned to February of ‘92.
“Thanks,” Dylan said, sitting slowly, wanting to make his presence in the room very much felt.
“Sorry about the wait,” Mr. Rabban said. Dylan noticed his darker skin and large nose, the protruding bridge screaming of Syria or Lebanon. The truth, though, is that he could’ve been from anywhere between Istanbul and Baghdad. “We’ve had so many people show up today with articles on the Middle East that I feel like exhuming Yasser Arafat’s rotting corpse and giving him this job.”
“I hope you’ve sent them all packing,” Dylan said, smiling but with all of his confidence. He still sounded condescending and he knew it. Oh, well, he thought. Keep up the appearances.
“Yes, well,” Mr. Rabban said. “We’ll go through the motions, yes?” Dylan didn’t like how that sounded. It was commanding but it still had a hint of patronizingly methodical bureaucracy that made him uncomfortable, as if the room had just become smaller and the fluorescent lights had been dimmed. Also, he sounded unerringly foreign, which made Dylan very self-conscious in a local magazine office in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
“Are you from around here?” Tor Rabban asked Dylan.
“Well, sir, I’m really from a lot of different places…”
“Doh, I’ve heard that before,” Tor Rabban cut him off. “Journalists are just like consultants,” he said. “You never want to commit to either a fixed location or a specific point of view.”
Dylan looked at Mr. Rabban straight in the eye now, as he’d read so much about doing from his interview books.
“Which is exactly what people hate about reading the papers,” Mr. Rabban continued, “they want to see and understand what the reporter who was there was thinking at the time. Facts aren’t enough - they can get facts from CNN. We offer them something more.”
At this Dylan pounced without thinking, heading for the strategic angle he’d planned on from the beginning, “But that’s biased and unprofessional,” he said, sounding much like his professors. “It’s like…” He paused, wanting to be steady on the topic, “…it’s like Gonzo journalism,” he said. “Trashy narratives that veer from the topic at the writer’s pleasure.”
“True, true,” Tor Rabban said, nodding gravely. “But people eat it up. And besides, there’s a lot of gonzo out there. Shitty, yes, but that increases the volume of good stuff that comes in every now and again. Don’t be fooled into thinking that just because the good doctor is dead that it doesn’t mean that the style doesn’t deserve credit in other worthy hands.”
Dylan didn’t know what to say. He hadn’t expected the editor of a non-political magazine to like Hunter S. Thompson’s work, let alone advocate for it in his publication. He’d spent his entire journalistic education learning that Gonzo, though fun for the writer and entertaining for the reader hadn’t been an acceptable form of journalism since Hunter Thompson tasted the steel and gun powder of the bullet he put through his head. He’d learned that the only people who even tried to emulate the style had been eccentric bloggers and unemployable correspondents, to say nothing of doing well.
“I’ve seen people come and go in this business,” Tor Rabban continued, “but the most consistent piece of knowledge that I’ve learned from this line of work is that the general public is at the reading level of the New York Post - a vocabulary of 6th graders.”
“Yeah,” Dylan agreed, smiling genuinely for the first time, “that sounds about right.”
“Look, remember that bit about the Danish newspaper that published a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad?”
Dylan nodded, “Why not? Danish flags burning in Damascus? It was a fiasco. Everybody remembers it.”
“Right,” said, Tor Rabban. “I remember it well. I was part of that Danish paper and…”
“Really?” Dylan asked suddenly. “What were you doing at a Danish newspaper, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“I’m half Danish,” he said, “and for all the ridiculous arguments that were made at the time, including my own in the defense of my paper, it occurred to me later that the whole thing was unavoidable.”
“Why?” Dylan asked, despite himself. Mr. Rabban leaned back in his chair, putting his fingers together in meaningful thought as he spoke.
“Because the people who want the drama are the ones that are buying the newspapers. We can never get around that.”
Dylan sat motionless again for about ten seconds, digesting what Mr. Rabban had just said. But Tor Rabban didn’t give him too much time to ponder.
“So,” he said, shall we get to it?” he asked, rhetorically.
“Yes, let’s,” Dylan responded with confidence, snapping out of his reverie.
“I’ve looked at your piece on the Middle East,” he said, looking down at the clippings in front of him on his desk. “It has a lot of balls, I must say, and I admire that. Have you been to Iraq?” he asked Dylan, point blank.
Dylan raised his shoulders and filled his chest. “Yeah,” he said, “I have. A friend of mine, an Army Captain in the Rangers…” Dylan recalled the face of the Captain, the tall, broad shouldered human torpedo that stormed into many a firestorm with pure courage and no brains at all. “I spent a month with his battalion stationed just outside of Fallujah and later in Rutbah, near the Jordan Junction.” Tor Rabban nodded but didn’t show any signs of being impressed. Dylan continued.
“I did most of my data gathering under the guise of a CNN reporter who’d been shot in the neck while standing next to a humvee. He unknowingly left me his credentials. I spent a lot of time under fire and I have a renewed sense of faith in our troops after it all but…” Dylan took a deep breath.
“But what?” Asked Mr. Rabban, still leaning back on his chair.
“But I still have a lot to say about this war,” Dylan said while exhaling.
“I see,” Mr. Rabban said, and Dylan saw his lips purse a bit. A moment passed while Mr. Rabban considered his next move. Then his face straightened out into a serious tone. “To be honest with you, it needs a lot of work.”
Dylan had seen this coming. This was, after all, a local magazine that featured one or two political commentaries as a way to diversify the reader’s knowledge a bit and he would not be a focus of the publication. But his in, he thought, was going to be to offer Tor Rabban political articles that he would normally have to pay syndicate fees to get from the likes of the Washington Post or the Boston Globe, and instead, he’d have an exclusive on these major stories. Dylan, in turn, would get his own political column in a magazine he believed would soon have a complete New York audience. He did his best to remove all signs of expression from his face. Tor Rabban continued.
“Your experience is interesting, and your facts are impeccable as they are thorough. But you don’t take the reader anywhere. Your articles don’t make me want to know how the story ends.”
Dylan sprung into his rhetoric. “Mr. Rabban, if what you want is a story that leads the reader to a predefined position, then there are a couple of old ladies outside your office who’ve been talking local politics incessantly in the hallway. Across from them is a short story writer who looks like he’s been out of work for long enough to have read all of Joseph Heller’s books, including the ones he didn’t steal.” Tor Rabban’s left cheek showed the faintest sign of a smile, but Dylan didn’t catch it and went on.
“What I’m offering you is exclusive access to Boston Globe and Washington Post quality, unbiased political columns for your magazine.” Dylan leaned forward in his chair, looking for a response, and Tor Rabban’s smile grew all over his face.
“What makes you think I like the Washington Post?” He teased Dylan, whose shoulders sank a bit. “Look, kid, like I said, it’s got balls, and your experience is interesting. I admire your stamina for coming in here like this today, with no credentials and a hell of a fish-story about Fallujah and some town I’ve never heard of. I’m just telling you I can’t publish any of this kind of thing you’ve given me. It needs a lot of work.”
Dylan’s deep breath left him slowly as his hands fell to his lap and his swollen chest deflated. But he had a plan B.
“Look, Mr. Rabban, with all due respect, I’ve heard these words of rejection before - develop it further; try us again some time; it needs more content and all that - but that’s not why I came here today. I’ve been writing about politics for a some time now, enraged, furious and still managing not to froth on the page and turn out decent, unbiased and logical journalism that can be digested and discussed. But nobody seems to want that anymore. Editors tell me left and right that their readers don’t have the attention span for what I’m writing, that people want to read things they already agree with, that they’re not interested in being presented both sides of the issue and that that’s why we have FOX news and MSNBC.
“And there have been the occasional few outlets that still publish news in a raw enough format that an intelligent person can imbibe it without throwing up all over the page. But I’m not experienced enough for them. I need to start out small, they say. So here I am. And you need someone good. I think I’m your guy. You want me to rewrite it? Fine. You want me to put more juice in the words, moisten them up a bit? Sure.
“But I need to know that some part of this is worth it. I need to know that you’re the slightest bit interested in any of these words. I’ll develop it, I’ll toss them around, I’ll starve over the words, rolling them about in my head if you want me to. But I need to know that there’s some valid reason I’m even trying. I need to know that someone in the industry thinks that I can hack this. That I shouldn’t give this up.”
Dylan lied. This was only the second magazine he’d gone to with his articles, but he’d heard the stories from other writer friends and he reasoned that his imagination could go farther than most, and he tried to imagine what a veteran out of work journalist would be saying, hoping to snag Tor Rabban’s attention with another angle.
“Is it interesting to you?” He asked Mr. Rabban one more time.
Tor Rabban thought silently. Who am I, he thought, to tell this kid what to do with his life? If he said no, the kid might quit, and fewer writers is never good for business. No, the more shit is out there, the more it becomes a buyer’s market, and that meant easier dollars. Fewer agents. God, I hate those lawyers, Tor Rabban thought. Besides, the kid wasn’t hopeless. He just couldn’t tell a story.
“Yes,” he lied, reasoning that more effort on the kid’s part would cost him nothing. “Yes, it’s interesting to me. Send me someplace with this story of yours. Come back next week with more - ahh, juice, as you say.”
“Fine.” Dylan said. “See you next week, then.” He stood up and leaned over the desk to grab his clippings, figuring the editor would offer to shake his hand when he did so. But instead of reaching for his hand, Mr. Rabban put his open palm face down on the papers on his desk.
“Leave these here,” he said calmly, and then added, “if you don’t mind.”
Dylan looked down at the Mediterranean-looking man square in the eyes. “First we try, then we trust,” he said with a coy smile. “You don’t think you’re the only editor I’m querying about these articles, do you?
Tor Rabban lifted his hands slowly and Dylan took his clippings and started to turn for the door. “Do come back next week,” he said, and as Dylan’s hand touched the doorknob he added, “and Dylan…” Dylan stopped. “The biggest mistake people make when discussing the Middle East is trying to stay on the fence. Take me to one side, or take me to both. but don’t try to stay in the middle. There is no middle.”
Dylan nodded, and opened the door.
–
Dylan walked out into the white hallway, his steps muffled on the blue carpet. He pulled the door shut, almost closed, stopping it just before it clicked.
“See you around?” came a voice from near the doorway. It was the guy from before. Dylan turned around and looked at him, really looked at him for the first time. Newly enthused by the recent good news that his stories had interested someone he let his excitement get the best of him and he smiled at the stranger.
“Yeah, sure,” he said, standing at the doorway still. “Say, what kind of stories do you write anyway?”
“Travel pieces, mostly. But not travel writing. That’s the lowest form of literature, man.”
“Yeah?” Dylan asked, not remembering the last time he even bothered reading a travel article.
“Yeah. I like to write about the stories as I travel, guide the reader a bit into my own adventures, you know? Especially when they’re not entirely factual. I guess it’s kind of like Gonzo writing, in a way,” the stranger said. “Have you read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72? That fucker will knock you on your ass. Twisted piece of work man, and heavy.”
“No, I like to stick with facts. No raving for me - it clogs the arteries. There’s enough weirdness out there in politics to nearly drown a man. I don’t need the drug-induced distortions of some out-of-control journalist who just couldn’t get a grip, know what I mean?”
“I guess so. But you’ll have to delve into it sooner or later in your line of work, man.”
Dylan thought about it. “Why not? The pigs will stuff me with bullshit one way or another, right?”
“Right. You might as well have a handle on it.” Dylan chuckled and the stranger put out his hand. “I’m Oscar, by the way” he said. “Oscar Bjørne.”
“Dylan Cormack,” he said, shaking it, then turning towards the exit. “Good luck with your stories, Oscar.”
“See you in another life, brother,” Dylan heard his voice echoing down the empty stretch of fluorescent lighting and drywall. Sure, he figured. Why not?
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