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| Posted by Thumpalumpacus - 01-15-2022, 02:00 PM |
(01-15-2022, 10:44 AM)SYZ Wrote: Next chapter? It's the last one, I've just been pretty busy lately and the chapter is huge -- 14,000 words, so I'm trying to figure how to break it up. I'm sure it'll go over the forum software's character limit. |
| Posted by SYZ - 01-15-2022, 10:44 AM |
Next chapter? 
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| Posted by Thumpalumpacus - 12-19-2021, 03:25 PM |
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37. Beer Run I hadn't returned to school after that last horrific day; but each day I had asked my parents when it would be that I could do so. I had spoken to Mike Kimmel once more, and Farah several times, but other than that, my only company was Susan, and Fred Gos- sage from across the hall. Slim pickings in- deed. We couldn't go anywhere or do any- thing; for us westerners, daylight brought the risk of kidnapping and nightfall threaten- ed us with the curfew and punishment for its violation, or being caught in a “disturbance”, which was a far deadlier prospect. The re- sulting cabin fever brought us all to a keen edge of irritability, and made even me miss school, no matter any attached risk. Then came a day when my Dad, who was still working daily, got in about 5:30 PM with a re- port of "one helluva riot" coming up Old Shem- iran Road. The dust and soot highlighting his worry-creases gave vivid testimony to what he'd seen. His breathing was hitched, and he did something I’d never seen him do before or since: he fumbled for a cigarette and lit it, only to realize he already had one going. That scared me. My sister and I retired a discreet distance where we could still hear what was said but lacked the presence to hinder its presenta- tion. Our parents sat at our massive rose- wood bar, drinking vodka-sevens. “How far away is it?” “It’s a ways away now, but it’ll get here.” “What should we do?” she asked. "Hon, get some food going now. Cook enough for plenty of leftovers. Make sure the cooler has a six-pack and something for you and the kids to drink, too." "Where are you going?" It was unsettling to hear that fear in Mom's voice. "I'm going over to Al's to pick up that piece." "No you're not, Johnny Lloyd." The fear had quickly left my Mom's voice, which was now hard with resolve. "I don't want that in my house." "Billie Ruth?" he asked, dropping his voice an octave. "What, John?" "Go down Old Shemiran Road. Then tell me you prefer no guns in the house." Silence, and a sigh. "Okay. Go get your gun." "I will. Now you get that food together." And he kissed her and left. Mom called Sue and I into the room. "You two run to Kuche Hashemi. Get your Dad a six-pack of Tuborg. Get a six-pack of 7-Up, and pick up some fruit to snack on." She handed Susan a thousand-rial note, and regarded us levelly for a minute. "You two head to the store and straight back. If I catch you even thinking about any other place . . . ." Her voice trailed off, and she turned her gaze on me. "If you see or hear that anything's wrong, you turn around and come back." After our dodge at school, with Farah, and that long afternoon, I'd gained some self-confidence, and it didn't escape my notice that Mom had directed this comment to me. I straightened my shoulders under the load. "Not a problem." And we left. Had I followed Mom's dictum conscientiously, we'd not have made it out of the courtyard, for as we stepped out into the twilight air, the smell of cordite and smoke suffused my nos- trils with their message of danger. Oblivious to everything, Fred Gossage was playing with soldiers off to the side. I looked at my sister but it was too late; she'd already let the door go, and it slammed shut. Fred looked up from his battleground. "Where you guys going?" He started gather- ing up soldiers and tanks. "The store," I said. "Wanna come?" Susan asked. She cried out as my shinkick landed. "Sure!" he said, and looked at her."You okay?" "I'm fine," she snapped, shoving me down the entryway stairs. "Let me go put these up," Fred called out as he disappeared into the building. I glared at my sister for a long minute. "What?" she asked, after a time. Her blue eyes flashed. "You know I can't stand that jerk, why'd you have to invite him?" "Listen, moron, three pair of eyes are better than two. And I can't be the only smart one here." "Hush, you," I retorted. "He wouldn't know smart if it came up and bit him in the ass. And anyway --" Footfalls in the stairwell behind us signaled Fred's impending return. "Anyway," I continued, "he's a chickenshit." "I'm what?" he asked chirpily. "You're a chickenshit. Now let's go," and I spun on my heel and left. Now, we didn't know what to expect when the doorman buzzed us through the court- yard gate and we stepped out onto Zafar Street. We knew there was a disturbance nearby -- close, judging by the haze and the pungency of the smoke -- but we had no idea where. The amorphous murmur of an angry mob echoed off the marble fa- cades lining the street, but the terror that tried to well up inside me quickly subsided with the thought that I'd been through this before, and that these two yahoos needed me to hang together. A thin film of sweat gave a sheen to Fred's olive skin, and the cocksure swagger in Sue’s stride was under- mined by her widened blue eyes and flared nostrils. My new-found self-confidence, so brash earlier, was muted now. We turned right, onto Zafar Street, and start- ed a brisk clip. In the distance, towards Mirda- mad Boulevard, I could make out the tiny dancing flares of riot fires littering the street, flickering eerily in the deepening night. The street had very few people on it where we stood, but we could make out their silhouettes against the splatter of combustion and street lights in the darkening night. After three blocks of walking we reached the Wimpey's burger stand that marked our first turn. As soon as we stepped out around the corner, the murmur rose in intensity, and a stale breeze brought fresh smoke to our faces. We had a three- block dogleg left to get to Kuche Hashemi. About four hundred yards past the crook in the dogleg, we saw the ragtag remnants of a freshly passed riot -- a few angry castoffs. Fred drew up stock-still, earning a curse and a shove from my sister until she followed his gaze and froze as well. "Come on, you two," I called back over my shoulder. "The store's gonna close in fifteen minutes." "The store's probably already closed," Fred replied in a quivering voice. "I mean, look at the street." "No, it's open," I said. "Hashemi wouldn't close early for his mom's funeral. And be- sides," I goaded, "no one's making you come along." I turned my gaze back down the dark, narrow street. The looters themselves didn't notice us in their preoccupation. Mindful of being backlit by the bright orange sodium-arc lights, we picked our way carefully along the sides of the buildings and took care to keep in the shadows. From our vantage we could see the rioters glee- fully smashing shopfronts and piling books and TVs in the street. Some of these piles were ablaze, giving the scene a Hellish countenance, and silhouetted against their own fires their orgy of destruction assumed the cast of a pagan ri- tual. It was a scene at once fascinating and dread- ful, and my mind reeled back from the psychotic canvas, struggling to grapple on something -- anything -- to stave off the upwelling fear. "No," Fred said again. "We can't go." My mom's caution came back to my mind, but bigger worry was the curfew, because with a lit- tle thought it was apparent that we had to do this now. I could imagine the ensuing argument if Dad had to go a night without his beer, and I wanted no part of that. As if she'd been reading the play of thought across my mind, Susan asked: "Think we ought to just head back?" Fred piped up. "I'm tellin' you, the store's pro- bably closed." "Hashemi ain't gonna close," I repeated. "And," I continued, looking at Sue, "Do you want to ex- plain to Dad why we're empty-handed?" "But--" Fred started. "Shut up," snapped my sister. "We're going to Kuche Hashemi." She thumbed over her shoulder. "Home's that way." As we drew up to the corner of Samovar Street and Fifth Place, a block from the store, we could see that Ha- shemi’s had indeed stayed open. The fluorescent glare of his storefront was a reassuring beacon in the darkness interspersed by mid-street fires, and our pace unconsciously quickened. Susan dug out her note for cigarettes (the note she'd kept care- fully pressed into a book) and I retrieved Mom's note permitting the purchase of Dad's beer, and also some of my allowance money, which I hand- ed over to Sue to offset the cost of smokes. Hashemi wasn’t there; a son was watching the shop. I fetched Dad’s beer, our 7-Up, and a bag of apples, and she bought cigarettes for us, two boxes of Marl- boro Reds. After prying Fred away from a five- month-old edition of Sgt. Rock , we set off into the night. And looking to the left, the way home, as we left the store, we froze in our tracks. The riot had come down Fifth Place, and we were cut off. At the end of the street that took us homeward was a mob engaged in chaos, busy with entropy, Hell- bent for leather. Darkened humanoid shapes swung improvised weapons at anything handy. Embers floated lazily skyward as fires were set in stores we’d passed not ten minutes previously. We stopped to gather our thoughts as I put the beer and then the apples in my backpack. I cracked open a 7-Up, poc- keted another, and split the remaining four between the other two. "What are these for? How're we going to get home? What're we gonna do?" Frank's voice, which was normally an annoying whine, was edging towards a panic. "Hush," my sister hissed. She walked over to a nearby payphone and lifted the receiver. “The phone's dead," she reported matter-of-factly. "Oh great," groaned Fred. I looked at him sternly. "You stick with me," I said, pointing to my right side, and then I looked at my sister. "You ready?" "Let's do it, Bubba." She was confident, almost cocky. Knowing my sister, and having seen this in her before, I immediately knew a few things. I knew that she was scared. I knew that she was actually willing to listen to me, for a change; and I knew that she was enjoying the whole even- ing, in an odd sort of way. This knowledge reas- sured me, and leveled my own thinking. I could make out little in the dark as I looked around and wondered how we could get home, but her eyes glinted in the dim light of this side-street. We crouched near the building and pondered the next move. "Listen up," I said quietly. "Stay small. Stay out of the light. We cross streets on a run." I handed the loose end of a backpack strap, about a foot of nylon, to Fred. "Grab this and do not let go. You do not want to get separated tonight. You'll be the lookout. Keep your head on a swivel and call out anything that moves towards us." He nodded grimly, biting his lip. I could see fear upon his face, but which of us wasn't scared shit- less? "Susan." "What's up, Jim?" "When we get to Zafar Street, you'll need to go tell the doorman to open up and get ready to close it quickly behind us. I can't run worth a shit with this," I added, nodding to my backpack with its attached passenger. "Um, I don't think so. I ain't running through a riot." I stood up, looked at her, and looked at Fred. "Okay. You take care of him and my backpack once we're close. I'll do it." A shade of scorn tinged my voice. She looked at Fred, then at the riot flowing past us barely a block away, and then at me. "It's cool," she said quietly. "I can manage it." "All right then. On my mark then, follow me at a run." "Let's do it." "Mark." And I took off across the street, towards an alley. Fred was dragging heavily on my back- pack strap, but he was still ignorant of the neigh- borhood, particularly at night, and we could not lose him. He'd be dead meat if'n we did. "We're headed away from home!" he huffed heavily. "We're also headed around the riot!" my sister cal- led out from up ahead of us, where she’d passed me up with my load. And from that comment I could tell that Susan knew what was going on, what my plan was: swing wide of the riot and apartment, until we could get to Alley Dinan, which let out in front of our flat, where we could hopefully get a clear shot into the gate. It was from there that Sue would arrange for an open gate. The alley we were currently navigating, which name escapes me, was pitch-black. I could feel rather than see small, fine pieces of ash clouding the air with Brownian motion. I picked my way carefully through the detritus littering the alley- way, not so much for stealth as much as to avoid startling them two -- or m'self. I was jumpier than a frog on a griddle. It took about fourteen hours to get through that little alley and onto Zafar. Make that “minutes”-- but each minute sure felt like an hour. My back- pack strap, where Fred still hung on, pulled at me as I stepped out into the sodium glare of Zafar -- one of Teheran's main thoroughfares -- which apparently worried Fred; but I wasn't go- ing back into that dark alley for love nor money, so I looked both ways as we left the alley, and was immediately grateful for his caution. About eighty rioters were scattered between us and our flat, busy shattering the plate glass of the local cornershops and hauling off juicers, rugs, auto parts, and food -- but piling books, TVs, and cassettes into the middle of the street. As I watched, one such pile nearby went up -- whoof! --and the radiant heat warmed my face. It was time for us to move again. "Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!" my sister hissed as I guided her out to the street with a shove. She crouched over and took off, and didn't stop until she was hugging the wall on the far side. Once she found cover in a doorway, she gestured to us: "Stay there, I'm scouting this way." "This way" in this case was another alley. Fred and I sat still behind a newspaper rack with a shatter- ed front panel. We were scared. I watched down Zafar Street while Fred tracked those rioters closest to us. After checking out the alley, Susan signaled the all-clear, and I led Fred running in a low crouch. Halfway across the street Fred lost first the strap of my 'pack and then his footing. I had so much adrenaline in my system that I only noticed him missing on reaching the far side -- the dumb sonofabitch was lying in the street clutching his knee, and so I went back and helped him to his feet. Just then an armored car at the end of the street opened up with its twenty-millimeter cannon -- a slow thud-thud-thud -- and a machine-gun -- whacka-whacka-whacka, quicker. Some rioters fell stricken, and something sharp stung my ribs as I helped Fred. That got me moving faster. It was all slow-motion as I watched poofs of marbledust stitch the facade of the building in front of us, and we kept running after entering the alley. "Go! Go! Go!" my sister shouted as she joined us en passant . The riot was now flooding the street we'd just left and my chest burned a little and I don't really think I thought anything at all; I was just a rabbit blind with fear surrounded by wolves and running for its den. We slid to a stop behind a dumpster. The pop- pop-pop of small-arms fire cut through the heavier whump-whump of that goddamned cannon. A cou- ple of rioters lingered at the entrance to our alley, seeking refuge from scything lead. I found myself thinking that the tracer rounds looked like nothing so much as the fireflies in the woods behind Grand- ma Redding’s trailer, except that the bullets moved in very straight lines. "You okay?" Susan asked us. "My knee hurts," said Fred, "but I'm fine." He crack- ed open his only remaining soda -- he'd lost the other somewhere in our mad dash -- took a drink, and smiled. "I just need something a bit stronger than this." The fear in his voice present earlier was gone. "And you?" she asked me. "I'm cool," I said, fiddling with a strap. "Give me a hand with this?" As she helped me she drew up. "You're bleeding. Where is it?" "I don't know." I shucked the backpack. "Goddamn, but that thing gets heavy." I opened my last 7-Up and took a long chug -- like Fred, I did wish for some- thing a bit stiffer, and thought very briefly of Dad’s Tuborg -- and as I shifted I felt something inside my shirt where it was tucked into my belt. Turned out to be a piece of bloody asphalt, which my sister inspected. "Well, let's get home, then. You ain't shot." "Roger that," I laughed. "Got your breath?" I asked Fred. "Let's blow this popsicle stand." The riot had cut us off from behind again, so we went forward and further from home, but no one griped about that this time. We made the next block ahead of the riot and turned left so we paralleled Zafar Street, a block south, in relative peace. We kept to the sha- dows, but the few looters on this street seemed intent on destruction and weren’t looking for three small scar- ed kids. I finished my soda but kept the bottle -- you never knew what you might need. Smoke blotted out most of the stars as we walked on in silence. Two more blocks and we reached Alley Dinan, which let out in front of our flat, and as we made our way to- wards the far end and drew up, I could see my bed- room window on the fourth floor, with the light on. And I could also right above that see the full moon, angry, orange, just as easily reached. This end of Alley Dinan was clotted with riot, impas- sable, close enough to touch, seemingly. "I am not going through that to get the gate opened," Susan hissed. "You can go to Hell." We pondered our fix for long minutes. "Well," I said finally, "we can always sleep in the jube," motioning to the huge drainage ditch to our right. "Old Shemiran looks pretty empty," Fred said sud- denly. "Yeah, and --?" I asked. "And if it's clear, we head up it, climb up to the roof of a store, and roofhop over to the apartment." "Don't be dense, Gossage," Susan snapped. "Goddamn it all, Sue, he's got a working plan there." She regarded me levelly. "You think so?" she asked finally. "Yeah, I do. It beats all Hell out of sleeping in the jube, too." "Mmhmm. How're we going to get up a build- ing without getting shot?" Fred looked at me, and then her. "We know. Follow us." We climbed hand-over-hand down into and then out of the jube, crossing its stream via a pair of large brick steppingstones. Sure enough, Old Shemiran Road was clear for the most part. A few desultory looters picked through the debris, but the riot-tsunami had already inundated and then receded from this side of the neighborhood. We could hear the armored car still tearing up Zafar with that godawful automatic cannonfire, but we had looped behind it and were no longer in the field of fire; and as we crossed back over Zafar Street we saw that, looking like some an- cient, injured beast of prey, it had backed into a building and was spitting fire and smoke at anything approaching. An infantry squad had dug into the surrounding rubble, and from there were laying down broad fields of unaimed fire. It was hard to see anything from a running crouch, but with senses made acute by adren- aline I counted at least five lifeless figures in the street, and there had to be more invisible to me in the raging darkness. I felt very aware of every detail of my surroundings, and at that point thoughts came fast enough to make the world feel slow-motion: Get to other side -- that soldier’s reloading -- don’t trip on curb -- they got him! -- did he see us? -- I was scared. Fred was leading us to a hidden walkway be- tween two stores, and it dawned on me exactly what his idea was. Near the back, we set one trashcan atop another, leaned both against the wall, and climbed up. From there, it was like climbing a giant staircase, from one roof to the next, until we reached the row of four-story buildings that included our flat. Tracers strung through the sky like luminescent pearls gliding through the smoke. The sound of mayhem was layered in dense textures, with the nearby sounds of our local disturbance riding atop the distant, attenuated bellowing of a city in upheaval; but given room from the immediate danger, I had time to fear the birthing-cry of mad- ness violating my ears. I also worried that we'd miss our own rooftop in the dark, that we'd pass it by comple-- Click. The gun was cocked. "Freeze, compadres. Do not move." The voice was flat, and bore death -- but it was familiar. "Dad?" "Jim? What in Sam Hell are you doing up here?” "The doorman looked kind of busy," I answered quietly. “Where's Susan?" “I’m right here.” Then he was hugging us ferociously, his fingers digging into my ribs. After a spell he stood back and looked at us in the glow of the turmoil. "Now why don't you go tell your Momma you're home?" he asked. "She was worried sick about you." I thought I heard a hitch in his voice. We were in the stairwell when I realized that I'd forgotten something. I left Sue and Fred as they headed down and went quietly back to the roof. My dad was standing at the balustrade, gazing at the mayhem below. "I almost forgot this," I said, cracking open a semi- warm, sweating bottle of Tuborg and handing it to my dad. He took the six-pack out of my hand, leaving me the open beer, got another for himself, popped the cap, and motioned next to his right side. The gun was gleaming coldly in the moonlight atop the retaining wall. The gunfire had ceased, for the moment, and the riot moved slowly west. "Why don't you stay up with me here and have a beer?" he invited. "It's looking to be a long night." Mindful of my bloody hand, I rubbed it quickly against the sweating beer bottle and stuffed it in my pocket before he saw it. "You said a mouthful there," I agreed, and took a long drink. |
| Posted by Thumpalumpacus - 11-29-2021, 10:32 PM |
(11-29-2021, 10:10 AM)SYZ Wrote: Dramatic and sad at the same time. I'm now waiting with bated breath to see Passing puppy love, to answer one question. This spoiler will ruin your bated breath: Spoiler:
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| Posted by SYZ - 11-29-2021, 10:10 AM |
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Dramatic and sad at the same time. I'm now waiting with bated breath to see if Mike, Jerry, and the rest of "the crew" ultimately survived, and particularly what becomes of Farah. Star-crossed lovers maybe? Or only passing puppy love? Hope you don't mind, small typo... "My feelings about Islamic radicalism took on a decided negative cast, and I wondered if my sister's school was subject to the same tomfoolery." |
| Posted by Thumpalumpacus - 11-28-2021, 04:36 PM |
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36. A Long Afternoon I was in Cultural Studies, fifth period. I cannot remember the teacher's name, but his thick brown mustache and heavyset frame stand out in my mind, as does his plodding diction. We were discussing Sumeria and really, I was bored -- and so, I sus- pected, was everyone else in the warm unvented classroom. I hadn’t seen much of Farah at lunch, either, and was irritated about that too. Slowly, with no precise moment of notice, we real- ized we could hear a local demonstration of radicals protesting the martial law. These had cropped up occasionally nearby, and a couple of my friends had seen some from the windows of their school-buses; and of course I’d seen two m’self now up-close. It was an odd assemblage of subliminal sounds rolled into one presence: the murmured chant ("down with America," if I remember correctly); the shuf- fling of thousands of feet; the dopplered two-tone wail of foreign sirens; the dense rumble of heavy machinery. No gunshots rang out that we could hear, but those are funny things, gunshots. You didn' always know when they happened. Mr. Mustache wasn't the smartest teacher I'd ever seen, but he really outdid himself when he tried to get us back on track by announcing: "It's only a riot." Like they ran on schedule, sure. At that point, perhaps a naked woman might have gotten my attention. An overweight guy lecturing on Su- meria would've done better to surrender to the riot and settle into a good book. As the bell rang the official end of fifth period, I hunted up Leb. "It's a riot, James." "No shit?" "A big one. I hope they didn't get my dad's practice." His dad was my orthodontist, and had done all of the work on my mouth concerning metal, except for Dr. Irvani’s fillings. I suddenly felt much more kinship with radical Islamic fundamentalists than I had pre- viously thought possible. "Look at it this way, Jerry: they'll only jack his offices up if they know he's Christian, right? Now, as much as I've prayed in there, I can tell you -- God is no- where near your dad's practice, crucifix or no." “Shaddup, you. What does a Texan know about good teeth anyway?" About this time Mrs. Reeves -- oh, you better believe I remember her name -- made a stab at order by call- ing roll. We answered dutifully, trying to get back to an enjoyable talk. No dice. Reeves pushed on with predicates until I was blue in the brain. I'd often thought that if the Bomb ever dropped, I could see her teach through World War III. Only a twelve-foot brick wall kept thousands of angry demonstrators from learning verb conjugations. After what felt like an eternity, the bell sounded the end of English and the beginning of the last class -- in my case, art history. I took my leave of Jerry Balassanian in the hallway, and never saw him again. I ran into Mike Kimmel near The Tank, and briefly saw Angus and Firoozi there as well. The riot had made the whole gang nervous and we found com- fort in each other's company for the brief moment between classes, wondering if the crowd were going to disperse soon and why they were picking on us anyway. Then the tardy bell rang and we had to go. I never saw Angus Fletcher or Firoozi Yams again. Mike and I had seventh period together, so we made some brave jokes at the party going on -- but the haze now suffusing the air added the odor not only of fire but fear as well. The teacher's lecture on color theory was also a brave attempt at denial that I think failed miserably; but we all pretended that it worked, and so it worked just fine. I s'pose we were about halfway through class when an office runner came in and handed Mr. Wood a note. He read the note, and then, his English accent dicing the words precisely, announced, "May I have your attention please? We will be staying here late due to our little disturbance. It won't be too much longer, but, again, we shall be staying late. Please continue with your work." Well, shit fire and save matches. My feelings about slamic radicalism took on a decided negative cast, and I wondered if my sister's school was subject to the same tomfoolery. I could really use a night off from her, but I preferred it be her kept locked up at school, not m’self. We went back to our quiet con- versation and drawing, which Mike and I kept up even after the final bell had closed the official day out. The rioting was louder than it had been all day, and the sun was now westering. I wondered if Farah was okay, if’n her dad was involved in this day’s events. The clock on the wall read 4:50 P.M. when the office runner returned, and suddenly I could hear that clock ticking even over the squalling miasma filtering in from outside. "Okay, children, you may walk to your buses. I'll see you tomo--" "Like Hell you will," said Mike rather loudly. He spoke my thoughts perfectly. An hour-and-a-half had pas- sed since the final bell rang, and we had still 15 miles of traffic to fight to my bus stop at the intersection of Zafar and Old Shemiran. I wasn’t coming tomorrow for love nor money. I was angry at this waste of my evening . . . for about three seconds. That’s when we stepped outside, and my anger was replaced by fear. It was still all wrong -- worse, even. The chanting and shouting, the sounds of melee, were as loud as ever, and the haze was now an acrid smoke, much thicker than before -- a surreal frosting on a hellish cake. I suppose I’d assumed that when they releas- ed us, it would be after the riot had subsided, but that assumption was quickly dispelled. The rumble of eighty school buses warming up, normally quite loud, was now background for the sound of sirens wailing and a mob chanting. Every so often, a bot- tle would carve an arc over the brick wall surround- ing the bus-loading area, to land in a shattering ex- plosion of glassy dust. Thunderous sounds rumbled my innards like Jell-O, and atop it all rode the chant- ing of an angry mob. Mike and I stuck together un- til we reached our respective buses. Farah’s bus was not in eyeshot. I found my bus and watched Mike get on his. As our buses pulled out, he gave the thumbs-up. I never saw Mike Kimmel again. Through the iron grill of the campus gates one could see a sea of angry twisted faces and raised fists, scuffling chaos held at bay, and I felt keenly afraid for myself for the first time in my life. As the buses waited while the Army troops tried to clear a path, our driver warned us all to keep our heads below window level -- particularly us West- erners. No sooner had he said this than we heard a crack-crack-crack, and the wrought-iron gates swung open as rioters fled in panic and the air filled with the smell of cordite. Protesters fell writhing, flung by the impact of metal on flesh as the armor- ed car at the end of the street added teargas canis- ters and the brute force of automatic cannonfire to the melee. The shooting died off, but police in riot gear were clubbing those still near the opened por- tal, beating out a path for us. Shocks of red torn out of dead crumpled humans cut through the gray haze. A kid outside my window clutching his bloody red gut, agony writ upon his face. Anger, fear, hurt, dismay, fierce hate. Soldiers ran alongside beating on the buses and screaming in Farsi "Boro! Boro!" -- "Go! Go!" -- but the shouted orders were unneeded. My bus was already moving and then we were in the crowd, bumping and rocking and rolling over dead bodies and my pants were warm with urine and sheer terror ruled me. Looking on in mute horror, living a nightmare, I heard no more shots, but they echoed through my brain and faces full of pain were frozen frames in my mind's eye. Some of the kids were crying, but I don't think I was a kid anymore. Leastaways, I wasn't crying. Now we wound our way through the sometimes- narrow, sometimes-broad streets of Teheran and I gazed in shock out the window, barely noticing the burning rubbish, broken windows, torn façades passing over my retinæ, scattered individuals fling- ing the modern world into the bonfires of ageless anger. I heard the young kid sitting next to me whimpering and crying for Mommy and we hugged each other fearfully as I gazed numbly over the windowframe at the Hell outside. Despite the driver’s previous admonition, I could not keep my head down; the scenes unfolding around us gripped my eyes mercilessly, forcing their way into me, deflowering my innocence rapaciously. We roll up to my stop, and even here there is detritus from an earlier skirmish. Now I'm drenched in sweat as well, and I pull off my tur- tleneck as I race the two blocks to the apartment compound. The guard recognizes me and has the gate open before I get there. My adrenaline is still redlined as I dash through the foyer and into the elevator, punching the button for my floor -- fourth -- perhaps six or seven times. I was still fumbling with my keys when the door opened. I fell into her arms and started shaking and crying. "Mom," I said, "I'm home." That day sounded the death knell for the world I knew. Although the imposition of martial law had impinged on my life, nibbled away at the edges of a broad range of activities, and I had seen a couple of friends leave, it was only when I woke up on 6 November 1978, with the day before resonating in my head, that I realized how far out on a limb our whole existence was, and how furiously the social upheaval we were witnessing was sawing at that branch. And more than that, I knew that my inner life was over too, that I would never be the same again. It was with new eyes that I regarded the bright sunlit morning. That morning was the beginning of our “house arrest”, as Susan and I called it; but I wasn’t much in the mood to go anywhere anyway. Someone might as well have crumpled up my world and skyhooked it into the nearest trash- can. Even if I had been of the mind to do so, there was no way my parents were going to permit me to carry on as before -- so this auto- matically put the kibosh on football, ripping up the town with The Expats, Farah, and school. (This last fact was brought home immediately by my sleeping in that morning). The city was strangely quiet and a thick haze hung low. It smelled of fire and gunpowder. Twice that sun- ny morning was the air rent by gunfire, one out- burst being pretty close and lasting almost an hour, intermittently. My mom had called in to her work as well, but I didn’t want the company of her or my sister, so I retreated to the balcony outside my room and mulled things over. After I’d gotten home the night before and told my parents what had happened, my dad and I went up to the roof. The evening was a regular Fourth of July display, with tracers carving swaths of sky and the surreal flicker of flames reflecting off’n the low clouds which had rolled in later that evening, and we watched the events unfold and intensify. The shooting got closer, appearing to come from the intersection of Saltanatabad Ave- nue and Old Shemran Road, and the volume of noise increased concomitantly. Along about nine o’clock we heard but not saw some armored per- sonnel carriers deploy not too far away, and the two tanks that had been stationed near Zafar and Mirdamad fired up their engines and wasted little time in taking up position less than four blocks from our apartment, by Old Shemiran. My dad, seeing this, had just decided that we should head downstairs when those M-60s opened up with their 105mm rifles and I heard the flanged whoosh of the shells splitting air followed by the dense crump of buildings stopping high-explosive rounds, and then Dad scooped me up and sprinted down the stairs. “Johnnie! Jim!” I could hear my mom calling up the stairwell. “Ruthie,” Dad called back. “We’re okay. Keep the door open.” “What the fuck are they doing out there?” she yelled hysterically. I’d never heard Mom say the F-word before, ever, and was stunned. We got to the door and I could see her eyes wide with fear, her brown hair frizzed. Susan stood behind her, trying to look out into the stairwell at us. We spent the rest of the evening in the bath- room. Aside from knowing (as do all natives of Tornado Alley) that the walls in your bath- room are the strongest ones in the house -- the pipes reinforce the plaster -- in this par-- ticular apartment, our bathroom was located almost exactly in the center of the building, and thus, Dad figured, was the best spot to sweat out the night, and so that’s exactly where we did it, all four of us. Sleep escaped me for most of the night. Aside from the discomfort of trying to sleep in the bath- tub while sharing it with Susan, I couldn’t dispel from my mind the memory of my schoolbus going ba-bump over those rioters like they were god- damned speedbumps. The shots I’d heard earlier had followed me home and punctuated the evening with exclamation points at random intervals, but what really haunted me through the night was the faces of the rioters I’d seen, in particular the one who’d been shot in the abdomen and was holding his guts in with one hand, staggering aim- lessly on the edge of the crowd near the school gate, and he looked at me straight in the eyes. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen or se- venteen, and he had a lost look on his face, as if he was a little boy who couldn’t find his mom. As he staggered towards the ivy-covered brick wall around the school, he was clubbed from be- hind with a rifle-butt and collapsed in a heap, his pinkish-orange intestines spilling out through the gaping exit wound in his left flank. Then my bus pulled off slowly and the mob intervened -- I could see that guy no more -- but I’d seen quite enough to torment me all night. As I write this now, I am thirty-four years old, and I can still see that guy’s face in my head as clear as day, the thin mustache, the drawn cheeks, the pro- nounced dimple in his pointy-rounded chin, the foamy blood he was throwing up after being knocked senseless, and he was left there to die, alone in that spastic chaos. Where was God in all of this? That morning after, on my balcony, I figured that maybe there was no god after all. I had beheld evil, witnessed its triumphal dance, and knew that I couldn’t expunge that experience from myself, that my violation was a perma- nent thing I would carry with me. I didn’t trust any benevolent world anymore, and, by exten- sion, any benevolent God who would permit this. I had spent years putting together the jigsaw puz- zle, and now that was on the floor, scattered, push- ed off the table by a remorseless reality where the dead were reported by the shock absorbers of the bus carrying me to the safety of a bathtub in the middle of a maelstrom. I didn’t know when, but I knew we’d be leaving soon -- because there is no way that bullets can defeat ideals. Once spoken, ideals are like virus- es that have evolved -- they do not go extinct, but hop from carrier to carrier until they find someone susceptible. Our time here was short. I didn’t know exactly why the revolutionaries hated us westerners -- it’d be some years be- fore I understood the complicity of our CIA in the Mossadegh Affair and the training of the SAVAK. I only knew that we didn’t belong anymore -- if ever we did -- in this land riven by anachronism. It was as if modern society, with its computers and statistics and shiny cars, was at war with some ancient tribal urge, and the present was losing out to faces with the dust of æons highlighting timeless creases. That morning on my balcony, as the smoke from last night’s Hell caressed my thoughts, I knew that this was not home any more. Mentally speaking, I began shutting down my overseas operations. I called Mike and Cory and Jerry and Greg, and Angus and Firoozi, and Kamyar Mehrdani, and we discussed what we’d seen at school yesterday, except for Cory and Greg, who went to Teheran American School -- my sister’s school -- which was largely unaffected. I had had to wait to use the phone, for my Mom was busy on it most of the morning, speaking to travel agents, so far as I could tell from discreet eavesdropping, and I made sure my friends knew this. The parents of my four non-Middle Eastern friends had made the same calls, apparently. After all the telephoning, I crept up to the roof to be alone. Then I returned downstairs and called Farah. It was a long phone call. Her dad was alright, but at work, and had been all night. No surprise there. She was shocked at what we’d seen, I think, although it was hard to hear that much behind her calm veneer. And then we hung up. The afternoon sun slanted through the haze. I thought about having to leave yet another group of friends behind, and how I’d miss the girl, how I’d miss her, and I leaked a little. But that was soon done. Our time in the sun was fast drawing to a close, and thus it was that I learned that to be an adult means to anticipate that things tomorrow will go wrong, that security is an illusion, and “goodbye” might be the only word with any real meaning anymore. And no matter what happened to me, I could no longer be a potato. |
| Posted by SYZ - 11-21-2021, 06:38 PM |
Still going well...  (Small double typo in #34... ”The radio squawked, cutting off our captor, The radio squawked, cutting off our captor,") |
| Posted by Thumpalumpacus - 11-21-2021, 03:23 PM |
|
35. Arrivals and Departures It wasn’t long before events caught up with us. Patrick Schulek was my first friend to leave. I didn’t know him too well, so perhaps “friend” is rather a strong word. “Acquaintance” suffices, yes. He was a skinny German kid given to wear- ing turtlenecks and pegged black jeans, closely cropped blonde hair, lively blue eyes. The Schuleks left in the middle of October for Nuremberg. Eric Marten was next, another acquaintance. He was a big, friendly guy, and I did like him -- but never got to know him well, as his family left shortly after Patrick’s. Eric, too, was Ger- man, and if I’m not mistaken, his dad worked with Pat’s. Other kids, too, had come up missing, but these were kids I didn’t know, who had little impact on me; but even so, all departures affected everyone. By the end of October, it was a rare day to get to class and not see a newly vacated desk. With mordant humor, those of us remaining labeled the malady the flew, as in: “Eric got the flew.” Everyone’s circle of friends was depleted, and the budding psychologist in me found interest in the varied responses to this epidemic. Some kids drew inward, not wishing to estab- lish any more ties than they already had, not wishing to burden their hearts with more good- byes when their trains left the station. Firoozi was a good example of this response, which in essence was the expression of a desire for sta- bility and shelter. He wasn’t much changed around us, his normal crowd; we could still ruf- fle his crew-cut hair and tease him about his growing waistline (Firoozi was a rarity, an Iran- ian with a heavy build). He was quite cooler and more reserved around those he didn’t already know, and this was, for him, a mark- ed change from an open, gregarious nature. The other response I had noticed, largely, was the inclination to treat even total strangers as longtime friends, to wave differences aside, to reach out even to those whom one didn’t par- ticularly like -- much like, I suppose, opposing soldiers sharing the shelter of a shellhole in no- man’s land, sharing their first-aid kits and ciga- rettes with men who’d just recently been aiming at them, like I’d read about in All Quiet on the Western Front. We’d made the cut, we were survivors, and if nothing else, we had that pow- erful fact in common. This also had some emo- tional elements from the idea of waltzing on the Titanic’s quarter-deck, I reckon. In the face of impending disaster, humans draw together, draw strength from each other, and lighten the sinking ship by jettisoning emotional baggage. It was right before my birthday that Kam came to school one morning morosely si- lent. Under a leaden sky, we sat quietly sprawled across the Tank. I sipped my hot chocolate and traced my fingers over Farah’s palm. We knew, the rest of us, what was on his mind, even if we didn’t know that we knew; it was a somber, un- spoken change that was nevertheless duly noted. To no one in particular, he suddenly spoke. “I caught the ‘flew’,” he said. “When’s the big day?” Angus asked him, matter-of-factly. “This Thursday,” he replied. “We’re leav- ing Thursday morning.” “Where does an Iranian go when he flees?” Mike asked. “In our case, Paris. Dad has some family near there, but we’ll probably not stay too long.” “No?” asked Farah interestedly. “No,” he affirmed. “My dad says the French aren’t real fond of immigrants.” “Depends on where you are in France,” she said. “At any rate, we shan’t stay, I don’t think. My dad’s hoping to get to Canada. I heard him and Mom talking about Montreal. They speak French there, too, and are supposed to be friendlier.” “Any place seems friendlier than here,” Angus said. “I know my parents have talked about it too. But Melbourne seems so plain, even to me.” I sat silently. Nothing to say. It was too early for “goodbye” and too late for well wishes. It struck me then that we were dancing on the edge of a black hole, one by one falling past the event horizon until the entire charmed time would one day be a distant past wrapped in an artificially-sweetened haze of memory. “Any place seems plain compared to this,” Mike said. “I think Leb is the only one who might consider staying here to be safer than going home.” “At least it’s home he’s going to,” said Kam, with no bitterness. “Is it, though?” I asked. “Well, yeah.” “I don’t know. The last time we were in Texas, I felt homesick for here.” “Don’t be silly, James,” my girl told me. “He’s not,” Angus told her. “We’ve all been here long enough. This may not be home to us yet, but Oz ain’t home for me anymore.” I looked up at Kam. “You won’t even be able to come to my birthday party,” I said suddenly. “Ain’t that a bitch?” “I won’t be missing much, I suspect,” he cracked. “Shit, my parents will be out, and Mr. Ha- shemi at the kuche store down the street has already given me my present.” “What’d he get you?” “A bottle of Chateau Zardasht. Not a mag- num, but it’ll do. We’re going to sit on my balcony and drink wine and play cards and water-bomb the people below.” Farah smacked my arm, nearly spilling my chocolate. “No wonder you Amis are so un- popular,” she laughed. “You wish you could be there too, eh?” Jerry kidded her. “Of course,” she winked. “We’ll save you a glass, baby, and you too, Kam.” “Saving doesn’t count if it’s in your bladder,” he smiled. The bell rang, signaling five minutes’ warning for the beginning of class. We sat quietly. The heavy gray clouds, now lower, had start- ed to drizzle us, anyway, a light misty rain that floated with the currents. You could see each individual droplet borne on its own tiny breeze land in its own little patch of ground. They couldn’t gather into proper drops, what with the autumn winds that rolled down off the mountains pushing them around, and so they milled about in suspension until gravity won out. We got up and started drifting out of the enclosed play-yard. “At least we have a few more days,” Jerry pointed out. “We get to say ‘goodbye’ and all that.” Kam stopped for a moment, looking up from his footsteps, regarding us solemnly. “I’m not so sure that I prefer that,” he said at last. “No?” “Seems to me that a guillotine cuts cleaner than a saw.” The drizzle whipped around our heads in a sudden gust as we began a new day. |
| Posted by Thumpalumpacus - 11-07-2021, 02:21 PM |
|
34. Lunch at the Mar Bella We carried on with panache through the autumn of ‘78. Goddamnit all, but she knew how to live, my girl did. We’d have lunch in one of the restaurants lining Takht- e-Jamshid, sometimes staying into fifth per- iod, eating caviar, drinking coffee or green tea out of a samovar, and talking. We talked. We talked about the world, and about our friends, and about football, and what we’d be doing that weekend. We talked about why we were here, and how we were affect- ed by decisions taken without our input. For my money, I was satisfied with the way things had turned out -- decisions taken without my input had still brought me good times and bet- ter friends, and what else can you ask for? We were having our lunch, with Jerry and Mike in attendance, one afternoon at a Spanish sea- food place. My baked flounder was about half- way done when over the radio was announced a demonstration downtown, with the admonish- ment to “avoid this spectacle and the trouble it portends”. Me, I had no problem with this in- struction; while the flounder was good, always the best in town, I had no desire to be in a dis- turbance. I had seen the gathering in front of Cory’s apartment get out of hand and, although I had no firecrackers with me on this day, I still feared the power I had seen unleashed. So it was that I urged haste upon us, and was duly put into place. “You’re not afraid, are you, Jim?” “Me? No. But --” “But what?” asked Jerry. “You’ve seen a riot up close, right, Jerry?” “Yeah.” “Well, do you want to see another one?” “This is different,” he protested. “There’s no SAVAK here,” he said, looking around. “Plus, I’m not nearly finished with my paella.” “Jerry?” “Yeah, Farah?” “Don’t be so sure there aren’t SAVAK around. Dad said there might be problems here today.” “So? They’re always around, but I mean -- ” “My dad --” she looked at him long, level, unflinchingly. “Your dad -- ?” “Yeah,” she said quietly. Jerry looked at her long and hard. “I didn’t know that.” He was getting lost in a memory, I knew, but then he returned. “I’ve seen the SAVAK in action, you know,” he said briskly. “I know what they do to people. And I know why.” “It’s not pretty,” she agreed. “So your dad said they might be here today?” “Yeah, he was saying we should stay away from here today, they had heard about this.” “So why are we here?” asked Mike. She gazed at him blandly, stabbing a camaron dulce onto her fork. “Because my dad said I shouldn’t be here.” God, she was great, no? But the crowd outside our café was barely there at all, and tranquil, not agitated, and so we finished our lunch in peace. Paying the tab, we got up and strolled leisurely through the stalls of the bazaar. I bought her a mood ring -- they had finally arrived in Iran -- and spent a while wondering what mood was grey. The warm autumn air was soporific, clouded with diesel fumes and the reek of fresh pro- duce and camel manure, and I didn’t want to walk. I wanted to lay down. “You know, Farah, I’ve only seen the SAVAK a couple of times. And I would never have gues- sed that your dad was involved,” Jerry said. “What, you didn’t see the mark on his forehead?” “Hush, you,” he laughed. “Seriously,” she said. “Just because he works for them doesn’t mean he’s a bad guy. That’s just what the revolutionaries say, but what do they know?” “What do they know?” asked Mike suddenly, seriously. “Huh?” “I mean, do they know something we don’t?” Jerry snorted. “You don’t need to be revolu- tionary to see the gendarmes at work,” he said. “I saw plenty outside Dad’s office one day. The guy’s guts were all over the entranceway.” “That doesn’t mean it was SAVAK,” said Farah. I could tell she was getting a touch defensive. “That could’ve been regular police for all you know.” “No, they were SAVAK. They had special equip- ment.” “Ma’am?” I offered. “What?” she snapped off. I thought the better of it. “Never mind.” “Not you too, James. My dad’s not a devil, you guys.” “I know that, Miss Farah. Leastaways, he does- n’t have a pointed tail.” She glared evilly at me. “Baby! I’m just kidding,” I protested. “But Jerry’s right, the SAVAK can be brutal.” She looked at me again. “You mean when they worked your dad over? Didn’t he hit a couple of them?” I grinned. “Yeah, pretty good shots, too. I don’t believe they’d been hit by a Texan before.” She sniffed. “There you are. He had it coming to him.” “Baby, you had to see him when he got home. He looked like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag.” Mike grunted a smile. “I ain’t gonna touch that, Jessup. You said it.” “Well, my dad’s no cretin,” she said. “But if it’ll make you wusses hush up, we’ll head back in.” As it happened, we were walking up to the wrought-iron main gate, and so only had to show our school ID cards; but the guard was nervy, per- haps due to the reports on the radio, and sat us down on the bench in front of the guardshack while he fetched up his boss. God only knew where in Hell his boss was, and God wasn’t talking; but this kid with a gun was gone for quite a while, we realized, when the bell sounding the end of lunch rang. “We’re going to be late,” Mike groaned. “We’ll write each other cover notes,” Jerry said. “I’ve got an exam in Algebra,” Mike answered. “I don’t want to miss it, I’ll have to make it up.” “Mike?” I said. “Yeah?” “I wouldn’t make any plans for tomorrow at lunch if I were you.” He socked me playfully on the arm. “And there’s detention tomorrow afternoon too, for fighting,” I cracked. “Keep it up.” Farah had her transistor radio out, and was listen- ing intently while Mike and I were cutting up. “Two people have been shot down on Takht-e-Tabriz,” she said. Her eyes held in them fear now, an emotion I had never seen there before, and her worry-crease folded in between her eyebrows. She squeezed my hand. “That’s only a few blocks from here,” Jerry said. He looked long at Mike, and then at me. “Oh, no,” Mike began. “I like a good laugh, but I am going nowhere near a riot. Screw that.” “Why would you want to go?” asked Farah. “What makes you think you can believe that?” Jerry asked, nodding at her little blue radio. “I’m not a reporter, I’m not looking for the ‘scoop’,” she answered. “Two or two hundred, they’re shooting people -- why do you want to see that?” “I want to see for myself,” I volunteered. I couldn’t say why I had changed my mind. “That, dear, is because you’re addle-brained,” my girl offered. “Anyone in his right mind --” “You with me, JJ?” “I’m there, Leb. Let’s do it.” Farah tightened her grip on my arm. “You aren’t --” “Baby, climb over the fence,” I said with a twinkle in my eye. “You know just where to do it, I’ll bet.” “Hush, you. I’ll not leave you out here alone. Who’ll look after you and keep you out of trouble?” She clicked off her radio, put it in her backpack. “Mike?” Jerry asked. “I guess,” he said. “Why do I let you guys talk me into crazy shit like this?” he asked himself. “We’re already late. At least now we’ll have a good excuse.” Farah looked at Leb. “Which way to go?” Jerry knew the neighborhood better than any of us. “Let’s catch Alley No. 66,” he answered, “over to Tabriz. If it’s too hot, we won’t be in the open.” And then we set out. I shouldered my backpack, securing both straps, and held Farah’s hand loosely. We walked warily, silently. I wonder- ed what was going on in their thoughts, the others. “I gotta pee,” said Mike. “So go in the alley,” Jerry told him. “No one’s around.” So Mike went in the alley, but we learned that Jerry was wrong. Towards us, about two blocks away, two policemen in light riot gear -- helmet, club, shield -- had noticed us, and started our way. “Hurry up!” Jerry hissed. Farah let go of my hand as they walked up to us. I didn’t know if Mike was finished with his chore or not, but I didn’t want to direct their attention by looking, so I was stuck with hoping he didn’t turn about en flagrante delicto. The policemen asked Jerry in Farsi what we were doing here; but Jerry didn’t do Farsi that well, and so Farah answered, telling them we had been cut off from school by the demonstration, and she added that some demonstrators had just run off towards the bazaar not a minute before the policemen had seen us. Perhaps if they hurried -- ? And so the policemen left, as Mike turned around, zipping his fly. “Are you done?” I asked. “All done, sir,” he mocked. “’Cause if you need to crap I’d just as soon you take care of that now.” “Wait ‘til we get in a riot. Then I’ll want to crap, and good.” “Let’s go, you guys,” Jerry called, and then we set off again. The streets were empty, even towards the bazaar, but now we noticed that the air was a bit hazy, a light grey haze settling down into the street, into our eyes, our lungs, our pores. A thin film of sweat coated me, partially from the hot Septem- ber afternoon, partially from the close call we’d just had with the galoots. And I’d be lying if I didn’t add that partly it was from fear, for we could hear the murmur of a large crowd now, a seething undercurrent of white noise. As we turned into Alley No. 66, we saw the other end blocked. A crowd was there, seemingly peaceful, milling about but not rioting. Now a reedy, am- plified voice reached our ears, and though I couldn’t understand what he was saying, I could hear that he wasn’t trying to sell them a Buick. Farah twined her arm around mine; I squeezed her hand. We sank against the wall, trying to be invisible, finding that there wasn’t near enough wall for our comfort. A siren wailed nearby, and a blat- ting fire-truck horn. The air became more acrid, and I had just decided to say something about leaving when Mike piped up. “You know, Jerry, I’m glad we came here; but I’ve seen quite enough for my curiousity.” He was very polite and his voice matter-of-fact, by which we knew he was scared shitless. Mike was never polite. “I’m not ashamed to agree with him,” I added. Farah gave my hand a squeeze but said nothing “You guys are just a buncha pansi -- “Jerry started before the guns began. The shots weren’t in front of us, but rather, around the corner, with a building interposed, and were muffled. They were semi-automatic shots, crack-crack-crack, and people were mil- ling and screaming and now running down the alley, towards us, and if we couldn’t persuade Jerry, the guns and those people running towards us sure in Hell did, because he jumped up and started run- ning like his feet were on fire. He slid behind a trash dumpster and called out: “You guys gonna waltz out there all day?” We had watched him run past us without moving, quite surprised by the change in mood -- and frozen by the sounds of gunfire, I think. Of course, Jerry, being a veteran of Lebanon, had finely-tuned responses. “It’s a lovely day for a walk, it really is quite fine,” said Mike nonchalantly as he walked back to the mouth of the alley. Farah grabbed his arm as we jogged past him, and Jerry. A bullet ricocheted down the alley and we heard an anonymous scream, and then another, as the weapons belched again. The tangysharp smell of burnt gunpowder filled my nostrils. Jesus, I thought, but what they’re close. We three, Farah, Mike, and myself, were around the corner and out of the alley now, but Jerry wasn’t, and so I ran back in, Farah letting go of my arm, and I stayed close to the wall as I grab- bed his foot and started dragging him back out. A man about fifty yards away screamed in pain, clutching his stomach. The two sensations, my touch and that scream, broke Jerry’s paralysis and he jumped as if shocked. I had to fend off a couple of kicks before he realized who I was and what was happening. “This way, Jim,” I heard Mike call from the street. “Army troops this way,” Farah cried. We broke and ran. Brickdust and gunsmoke hung heavy in the air, and a shopwindow to our left broke in a spray of glass. When a bullet flies nearby, sometimes you can hear it splitting the air, if it’s close enough. The sound of rounds rending the air overhead in- vaded my ears for the first -- but not the last -- time. An ambulance sped drunkenly past us, head- ed away from the riot, one tire flat, blue lights flash- ing. People spilled out of the alley behind us, and as I looked around to get my bearings, I saw the man who’d screamed, holding his gut, now folded over sideways, his midriff now a sheen of slick blood in the bright sunlight, falling in a heap and twitching, and then Farah was pulling at the hood of my windbreaker, and so we resumed our flight, down Takht-e-Tabas, turning left in front of the school, headed for the wall where her and I had jumped over not too long ago after another long lunch period. Into the ivy -- laced fingers giving a boost -- up and over -- Mike hung at the top of the wall to help me up -- and we landed on the other side, at the edge of the soccer field. It appeared that everyone in the school was standing out on the field, and many took note of our stylized entrance. We had a welcoming committee. What the Hell was going on here? A nearby teacher cornered us immediately, and took us to the assistant principal close to the foul line of the near goal. He held a walkie-talkie in one hand, and sweatstains were visible down the sides of his pinstriped shirt. Dust from the dirt field billowed up under the footfalls of over a thousand pairs of feet, and it was clear we weren’t the only ones who’d been preoccupied this afternoon. “Mr. DeGraw, these kids were caught climbing over the fence --” The radio squawked, cutting off our captor, The radio squawked, cutting off our captor, who stood there, sweat running down his jowls. It was hot that day. “Trying to leave?” DeGraw asked, once the radio permitted. “No, sir, coming back.” He stopped for a moment, his sandy hair ruffled by the day’s events, apparently. “Coming back? From where? Do any of them speak Farsi?” “From lunch at the Mar Bella, sir,” Jerry said “near Takht-e-Jamshid in the bazaar.” “I know Farsi,” said Farah. “No,” DeGraw said absently, “it was a guy on the phone.” “Huh?” “Oh, never mind. Detention is out of the question today -- we’ll see what to do with you kids later.” He looked at the teacher who’d brought us in. “Just get them to their classes right now. We’ll figure out what to do with them later.” Farah lied about her class, and so was able to stay with Jerry and I in the corner of the pitch where Ms. Reeves’s class had gathered. Reeves was so dis- tracted -- or senile, if I may be uncharitable -- that she realized neither that we were late nor that Farah wasn’t one of her students. Apparently, near the end of lunch, a bomb threat had been phoned in -- thus we had problems get- ting back in -- and the other kids had been sitting here for over an hour. Once they learned where we’d been, and what we’d seen, they were full of questions. Mike, who’d drifted over from his algebra class on the other side of the field, was happy to give the play-by-play, and so Farah and I sat, hold- ing hands, against the ivy-covered wall. I was in a shocked daze. Jerry sat catty-corner from us, and he only looked at me from time to time with an emotionless gaze, and now and then I could see little glittering tears at the corners of his eyes. I thought back to what we’d seen earlier in the day, the guy getting shot, and to what Jerry had told me the day we’d met, two years ago: “ . . . I knew that if I wasn’t careful, I was going to trip on his intestines.” And suddenly I leaned over and threw up into the ivy at the base of the wall, threw up that wonderful flounder for which I’d paid four hundred fifty rials, threw up the curried rice, threw it all up, and I got up and started off towards the restroom near the midfield sideline to get cleaned up, but not before vomiting again. I still saw that man, twitching, glassy-eyed, propped up on one elbow. Tears stung my eyes now, wetted my face, and I began to run. Jerry and Farah followed behind me, and the girl pulled me to a walk. “You okay, Jim?” “Yeah. Just need to get cleaned up.” Jerry looked at me. His own eyes were once again glassy with tears he wouldn’t release as he asked me: “Now you know why, huh? Now you know?” I could hear the hurt in his voice, the longing, the surety that now someone would know him, would understand him -- “Sure, Leb. Sure I know,” I assured him, as I won- dered what in Hell he was talking about. “But I don’t know why you would want to see it again, having seen it once.” “I had to know, James. I had to know if it’s real, if it really happened, that it wasn’t just a night- mare I dreamt one night, I had to know.” “It’s both, Jerry. Both.” "What are you talking about?” asked Farah, from aside us. “Don’t worry about it, baby,” I told her. “He’s out of his mind with fear, and me out of mine with dis- gust.” “You’re not afraid?” she quizzed me. “Tell the truth.” Her tone was mindful, warning. “Oh, I was scared, no doubt. Scared witless. And I still am. But this is more --” I motioned down, where some vomit had missed the ivy and caught my Levis “--this is disgusting.” I had stopped cry- ing. I was ashamed. “After this afternoon, you’re worried about a little vomit?” Jerry asked. ”Be happy you didn’t pee your pants.” “I’d rather have peed my pants,” I answered. Now Jerry looked at me again, this time in surprise and not supplicating. “Are you nuts?” “No. At least if I peed my pants --” I looked at Farah’s beautiful, grimy, dirt-streaked face, her doe-eyes, her sweaty, matted hair “--I’d have a chance at a kiss. No way that’s going to happen now.” Humor came back to those doe-eyes now, those sad brown eyes, the first time in hours it had been there. “I don’t care how many people say it, baby,” she mur- mured. “You’re no idiot.” “Gee, thanks,” I said, “I think.” |
| Posted by Thumpalumpacus - 10-31-2021, 11:58 AM |
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33. Blood and Bones It was his face I saw on the sled, with his leering blue eyes and tufts of straw-blonde hair sticking out from underneath the Rid- dell helmet that bore a sticker of an airplane and a couple of game-ball stickers, too; it was his jersey, number double-aught, that I saw on the dummy. And when the first- string defensive line fired out at the sled, my legs pistoned furiously as we knocked it back a few more feet in the fading afternoon. Purchase was hard to find in turf recently soaked by the out-of-season rains, but the mud in every crease of my body annoyed the Hell out of me too. My feet slid out from under me as my end of the sled slid back under my personal assault. Gah. More mud. I don't exactly remember his name; I think it was Mike. On my team, we merely called him “Zero”, or “Zero the Hero”, after his num- ber. He was a short little sonofabitch who played halfback for the Jets, and he wasn't going to be topping my list of Nobel laureates that year. He was one of those guys who talk- ed bigger than he walked. He was a runt, at least five inches shorter than me, and couldn't run the football to save his life. There was no earthly explanation for his being their running back. The second game of the season we'd lost to them closely, I think fourteen to seven, and we'd held him to about five yards rushing; but to hear him gloat after the game, he'd won it by himself. To top it all off, he wouldn't shake hands in the post game line-up. As my Dad often said, "The only thing worse than a poor loser is a poor winner." He'd proven himself to be a poor winner. Next Thursday we would make a poor loser out of him too. Come to think of it, that entire team, the Jets, was staffed with a bunch of jerks. The blood between our teams was bad indeed. I played for the Cowboys, a name with religious overtones to any true Texan, and while we weren't saints, we played good clean ball. Our coach, Coach Stroud, was a Texan himself, from Waxahachie, and I think had a touch of sentimentality about coaching a team called the Cowboys -- even if'n it was only Pop Warner. He was a hard and a proud man, and he drilled us tough. After a rough start, losing two of our first four games, we'd climbed into first place in our six-team league; but he had no room for loudmouths on the team, and brooked no cocki- ness on our part. "Good pushing, guys! Now let's go show the offense what D is about." Practice was almost over, and it was time to scrimmage first teams. We hustled over to the middle of the field, took a short water break, and lined up. "Black Defense, over here!" called the Coach. We sprinted -- last in the huddle won an extra lap after practice -- and he crouched low to meet us. His assistant, Coach Allbright, was doing the same with Green offense. When we'd arrived, Coach Stroud started up: "Now, they're going to be running the Jets offense -- lots of short passes, running outside the guards -- so pay attention. You're going to be seeing this Friday. Remember: attack the ball, but stay in your lanes until they commit. They’re mighty fond of decoys. Ends --" he looked at me and Chuck Gordinair, the other defensive end -- "Keep your eyes open for reverses. Now let's go!" "A-oo!" we grunted. An hour later, practice was over, and I was running two laps I'd earned for tackling above the chest. But my dad had another saying: "Practice like you play, and you'll play like you practice." And I had some heads to hunt in our next game. Although the social unrest had been going on a while now, it hadn't yet exploded into violence, and so the brilliant Indian-summer October day was, unbeknownst to us, one of the last peaceful days we'd enjoy. Well, for most it was peaceful -- but Black D was fired up and ready to pillage. We had scores to settle and ledgers to balance, and we weren't about to let the crisp sunshine and birdsong ruin what we referred to amongst ourselves as "blood and bones". Pain was on the menu, and not even Farah's kiss before the game softened my resolve to dish some up, be the diners willing or no. Item: After I'd sacked him for the third time in the last game, their quarterback had spat on me. The ensuing fight had gotten me ejected from the game. Item: After making a helluva tackle, our middle linebacker, Brian, had gotten kicked in the stomach. Item: This little halfback, Zero, had been saying all week that he'd rather play old ladies, they tackled harder. So when they won the coin-toss and elected to receive, those of us on the defense weren't put out at all at the loss of initiative. In fact, we con- sidered that we had the initiative. Our chinstraps snapped and helmets smacked as the kicking team came off-field chers of the crowd filled our ears as we trotted out to the huddle and took our lineup. Now, I'm not given to athleticism, but football, to me, wasn’t a sport; it was a way of life. I had grown up with it. As a boy in El Paso, my friends were always at my house on Saturday mornings, when my dad would play full-time quarterback and we'd play no-pads tackle all morning. I had gotten a helmet for Christmas when I was four years old, along with a regulation NFL ball. And even when my friends and I weren't dragging each other through the yard, my dad was drilling me on pass routes, and how to lead a receiver when throwing, and the best way to tackle -- "at the knees, Jim, if you can't clock 'em" . No, football wasn’t a sport; it was religion. When the Cowboys "drafted" me, as it was called, I was pretty much given my pick of positions: wide- out, outside linebacker, or defensive end. I figured tackling was better than being tackled, but still scor- ed the second-string receiver spot as well as start- ing defensive end. If I was small, I made up for it with tenacity, and even a vicious streak, and did my best to correct for my lack of mass by using velocity. I acquired a reputation as a hard, clean hitter. So as I lined up at right DE that Friday morning, my confidence wasn’t baseless; it was a sober confidence that had been honed not only by six victories and two losses, but by years of playing. I knew the tackle lin- ed up opposite me was big, but he didn't know how to use his weight, and so even though the first two plays went away from me, I made sure to flatten him, just to get things off on the right foot. He had to know who was in charge, and I had to show him. That settled, we lined up for the third play. Already I could see him back on his heels, ready to back up at the snap, so I knew either it was a pass play or he was scared something fierce. Then the snapcount came, and as he lifted up I did a swim move, threw him out of the way, and saw that little s.o.b. Zero running towards me; but just before I laid my shoulder into his belly and threw him three or so yards, he handed off to the receiver running the other way. "REVERSE!" I shouted, making sure I did so next to the earhole in his helmet. "Goddamnit!" he grumbled. I fell on him to see that he wouldn't participate in the play, and when it was over I offered a hand to help him up, grinning. "That's one," I said. "Kiss my ass." He jumped up. "Luck runs out sooner or later." "Bet luck runs better than you do." They punted, and our offense turned our first possession into a field goal. Towards the end of that first quarter I got my first good clean shot at their QB, Richie, and took it, on a roll-out to my side where I had again flattened my tackle. Richie had just squared up to throw and so I missed the colos- sal hit I was trying for, but I was able to wrap him up, spin, and throw him about five yards back. It was a joy to hear him chewing out the tackle I'd run over to get the play, but for the rest of the quarter I was double- teamed and the plays came hard; in fact, they ran a reverse to my side that saved a drive and resulted in a field goal. We played the second-string in the second quarter of the game, while their first team remained on the field; despite this, neither team scored. We'd mounted a late drive threatening to do so (to which I contributed a sin- gle short reception and a drop), but our effort came up short well outside of field-goal range -- fifteen or so yards in that league -- and so we went into the break tied at three. Us second-teamers stayed afield for the third quarter, and theirs took the field as well, and so our depth on the bench began to tell as we took control of the game. Derrick Gastrow, my buddy from the days of living on Alvand, was our backup halfback, and with him run- ning well, we ran down both the field and the clock. We scored twice, and pushed their team around -- the little Hero was playing cornerback, but covering our other receiver, who tore him up. On one play, where Mikey and I wound up in the same pile, I was nice enough to point out that he was getting an awful lot of help getting up off the turf, and that he should re- member to send thank-you notes. He didn't seem to appreciate the point. I didn't get much of a break in the game, for as fourth quarter began our coaches played our first-string again; but it was a downhiill coast, for the game was for all intents over. They still tried to play, but I'm proud to say that our defense was truly dominating -- they went three-and-out on three possessions in that last quarter, in which I added three tackles, a sack, and a forced fumble to what was turning into one helluva game, personally. My last play was on a halfback toss com- ing to my side, in which I split my blockers and arrived at Mike about the same time the ball did; but where the ball was softly arcing through the autumn sunshine, I was violently accelerating, head lowered, arms wide, and the top crossbar of my helmet arrived on target about splitting the difference between the double zeroes on his jersey; and together we flew, locked in spiteful embrace, until we landed -- on him. I felt the expulsion of his air on my face as I glared scornfully at him. "That’s three," I said. "How you like them apples?” I didn't hear his response. We won that game convincingly, and went on to run the table on our season, winning the championship pulling away. But as we lined up on that fading after- noon sun to shake hands with our vanquished foes, we saw that they were walking off the field, show- ing my dad once again right in his assessment of peo- ple. Poor winners, in this case, indeed became poor l osers. Now, I'd thought that through eight games and many practices that I'd seen Coach Stroud mad. I was, in this case, very wrong, for I hadn't seen him mad until this day. Until this day, he'd been a gentleman and a scholar, the very picture of propriety. Until this day, he'd been a model of decorum. Until this day, he'd been possessed of Buddha-like serenity. On this day, his switches were safety-pinned in the "pissed-off" position. For, as the Jets filed sullenly off the turf, he threw down his cap and ran over to their coach, and every word he yelled was clearly audible. He was hollering as only an angry red-headed Texan can yell. "What in Hell are you thinking?! Don't you dare insult my boys this way! You turn your Goddamned team around and march their asses back on this field, and I mean now!" "They don't want to," came the nervously quiet, but still audible, reply, "and I'm not going to make them." "Why, you sorry son of a bitch," said the Coach, and then he pulled back and clocked the other guy but good. He crumpled to the ground, and Coach Stroud leaned over him, ready to strike again, yelling again. "I ought to kick the living shit out of you, you no-good piece of skunkbait!" Then the other adults got a hold on him and pulled him away before he could really knock this guy into next week, leading him fuming off the field. Our assistant coach, Coach Allbright, led the post-game prayer and huddle. "Lord, we thank you for granting us victory on this field today. We pray that you teach us humility and generosity both in victory and defeat, and we pray that the lessons learned in sixty minutes of hard playing last longer than those learned from one minute of anger. Amen." "I don't know about you," I said to Chuck Gordinair, the other end, after we broke huddle, "but I'm praying I remember how to punch like that, m'self." "Shit," said Chuck. "I’m just hoping I don’t piss him off." |
| Posted by Thumpalumpacus - 10-24-2021, 03:30 PM |
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32. Farah Her hair was long and wavy, and coal-black. I couldn't see much of her face -- she was three or four spots ahead of me in line talk- ing to a friend, apparently, who stood in front of her -- but I had seen her face ear- lier that day, and it was still in my mind, an afterimage, like when you stare at the sun too long and turn away and still see a burn- ing orb, and even when you close your eyes you see purple and red under your eyelids. A mole on her left cheek. Soft, wide lips -- well, I had imagined they'd be soft. She had huge brown eyes, big eyes that seemed to regard the world with more than a little sad- ness. (It goes without saying that they didn't notice me when they'd drifted my way). The guy at the head of our line was taking an awful long time. It being the first day of school, we were at the school's bookstore buying our supplies: composition books and protractors, pastels, an art pad, and pens in my case. My new classload was going to be hard: Euclidean geometry, French, Eng- lish grammar, art -- which at Community meant "theory and history of art" -- cultural studies (a fancy name for "world history"), and American history. The geometry and French classes had me worried; geometry because I didn't know truly what to expect and French because I did. The line started crawling again, and then she was passing me headed the other way, her purple scarf now tied around that beau- tiful hair black as a Bible, and then she was gone and I was fumbling dumbly for my money. "Shut up already, Jim," said Mike. "I'm tired of hearing about her." "We're tired of hearing about her," Angus cor- rected in his Australian accent. "Sorry, guys," I said insincerely, finishing the last of the slice of apple pie that was my lunch. "I'm just happy I have her in Geometry is all." Jerry rolled his eyes and climbed to the top of the jungle gym, where he dangled his legs through. "You're pathetic. I've never seen anyone swoon like this. I sure didn't expect you to do it." "What's 'swoon' mean?" I asked. "What you're doing," he glared. "Going ga-ga over a girl. Making us all wanna puke. That's swooning." "Naw, I'm just happy I'll have a chance to meet her." "Great, Jim. Just shut up about it already, okay?" Mike skyhooked his empty soda can into the empty trash can, where it rattled and then settled. "Just can it," he punned. Some friends. As you may've deduced by now, she was the first gal who’d caught my fancy, really. I'd had girlfriends before, but they were friends who had happened to be girls; but Farah, well, my feelings for her were dif- ferent. And I knew it immediately not in how I felt about her, directly, but in my natural understanding that I shouldn't try to describe these feelings to my friends. It was this instinctive protection of these feelings that first alerted me that they were different. I knew that I shouldn't say too much about her to them, that I should play my cards close; but I just couldn't help it, and so they were soon sick of hearing me. And that was the second way I knew that I was hooked: I just couldn't help it. She continued not noticing me for a while. As the newness wore off this school year, and we settled into a routine, I found a couple of surprises. I liked my classes, for the most part, French being the excep- tion. It wasn't a case of disliking the course- work, but rather the teacher. Ms. Azari had moved back to France, and our new teacher, whose name escapes me to this day, was about as pleasant as a solid kick to the groin. It took me a while to place her, for she had a face I had seen before. Then one day I realized she had proctored my entrance exam to this school, and I knew that my first impression of her, form- ed that day, was not off-base. At all. But I enjoyed all of my other classes, par- ticularly geometry. I had always hated math, although I had no problems learn- ing it until Algebra. Because that had been my last class in this field, I had been dreading geometry. I soon learn- ed that where algebra required formulaic number-crunching and little thought, geo- metry permitted creativity while deman- ding logic. I found the dual nature enticing, and as we got further into the class, I de- cided to join the geometry club. This too I kept from my friends, which entailed further creativity on my part in that I had to come up with reasons why I wasn't on the bus after school, or where I was during lunch. I didn't much give a tinker's damn. You see, Farah had joined too. It happened one day that I was discovered. "Go to the bazaar for lunch, Jim?" Angus asked me. "Naw, I've got detention, and I told Barakh" -- the school principal -- "that I needed to do it at lunch, that I had a doctor's appoint- ment after school." "I've got lunch detention too," piped up Kamyar. "Do you really have a doctor's appointment?" asked Mike. "No, doofus. I just don't want to take the late bus, the folks will want to know why." "What'd you do?" Angus asked. "I was late to English." "Reeves is a bitch." "You got that right," I agreed with Jerry. "I hate her." The bell rang, signaling the end of morn- ing break. "See you at lunch, man," said Kamyar. I was jammed, but figured to Hell with it. I'd take the heat -- now to make it worthwhile. We spent forty-five minutes talking about a couple of axioms regarding their impli- cations vis a pair of parallel lines crossed at an unspecified angle by a third, straight line. It didn't hurt that Ms. Elliot was quite attractive; but she didn't captivate my at- tention like she had in fifth grade. Of course, Farah wasn't attending Community Interna- tional School in 1977 , which is a good thing, for had her and I had Algebra together, I'll lay dollars against your doughnuts that I'd not have passed the class at all. I went up to her at the end of the meeting. "Farah?" "You're James, right?" "Yeah," I said. "I have you in Ms. Elliot's fourth period." "I know," she said. "You sit three seats behind me." "Counting?" I teased. She blushed momentarily. Her skin looked so soft, tender -- "So what'd you want?" she asked. Thinking fast, I shot the moon. "What are you doing tomorrow after school?' "That depends," she answered, being coy. "Listen," I said, "let's go have a late lunch at the bazaar. We can tell our folks that we have a club meeting; we have a project, right?" I winked at her. "Um, sure. Tomorrow. Meet at the gate?" "Sounds good," I answered, feeling about seven hundred and fifty-eight pounds lighter. "Three-thirty?" "Three-thirty," she agreed. And that was that. "You missed detention, Jim!" Kamyar said as our bus rattled and bumped over the potholed street. "Nothing gets by you, eh?" I wisecracked. "You know that's your ass," he said. "You weren't there at lunch, and you're missing the afterschool session now." "I was busy." "Doing what? Getting in more trouble?" Kamyar was a good guy. Really, he was. He had a propensity for drama, though. He seemed to careen from Crisis to Crisis, and, as if he'd seen this in himself and needed company, he liked to make every- one around him Crisis-ridden as well. He was an ectomorph, thin to the point of emaciation, and gangly, wearing wire- rim glasses, and possessed of a high- pitched voice too. In short, he had all the cards stacked against him as a schoolkid. What's more, he knew this about himself, and was pretty touchy about it; so it was there that I aimed my parry. "Don't be such a wuss, Kam." "Shut up. Don't dodge the question. What were you doing?" He was defi- nitely irritated now. "Making a date. You know what that is, right?" "Duh. A date? With who?" "Well --" "It's Farah, huh? A date with Farah?" "Well, yeah." "Great. Now we get to hear you whine about her all the time." "Shut up, dork. At least I can get a date." "At least you can get a headache," he sneered. "Just don't give it to the rest of us." Jeez, was I glad when we finally rolled up on his stop. He just couldn't wait to say something to the guys. He just couldn't wait to blab. We had no sooner got off the bus the next morning, getting our hot chocolate-- I poured mine into an old Dallas Cowboys coffeemug I'd pilfered from Dad, and, dis- carding the styrofoam, settled down at the Tank, a stack of large-bore concrete pipes so-named for its superficial resem- blance to a real tank, four sections of pipe across the bottom, and one atop and to the front, where the turret would be. We used to see how many students we could pile in there; I think twenty-two was the record. Our morning bull session was getting on a good roll when Kamyar re- membered. "Hey, guys, guess what? Jim here has a date." Mike laughed. "What are you gonna do, carry her piggyback? You're not old enough to drive." I sipped my chocolate and chuckled. "I'm going to rent a duroshke, dimbulb." "With who?" asked Jerry. "Three guesses," sighed Kam, "and your first two are freebies." "Aw, jeez," moaned Angus, walking into the conversation. "Is he talking about whatzername again?" he asked around a mouthful of cinnamon roll. "I'm not," I answered. "But Kam just can't control himself." He looked at me indignantly. "Well," I said defensively, "it's true. I didn't bring her up." "But you didn't tell everyone what's been going on. Every time you've missed lunch, or a recess soccer game, where've you been, huh? You didn't tell them about yesterday, either." "Y’all asked me not to talk about her," I shot back. "And besides, I knew you'd be shouting it out. Figured I’d save my breath and y’all’s time." His face reddened and his fists were balling up, but that only prod- ded me further. "Why, I'm tempted to think you're jealous of me." "Don't flatter yourself." "And don't bother yourself with Farah if you dislike her. It ain't your date anyway." "It's not her that bugs me, Jim," he said pedantically. “She seems nice enough, I suppose.” He paused. "But you lied to us, and I don't like liars." I set my hot chocolate down and stood up. "Mind your words, Kam." "Well?" he retorted. "You told me yesterday you had detention, but on the bus you said you skipped it. I'll bet your name ain't even on the sheet. You lied. End of story." "Hmm, let me make sure I have this clear: y'all want me to stop talking about her, but if I'm doing something with her, I have to talk about her. That about right?" "Would you two just shut your fookin' traps?" Angus asked suddenly. "Who bleedin' cares?" The bell rang out the five minute warning. "Jesus, you sound like such women," he added, grimacing at the last word, as if it were unsavory on his tongue. "It's no big deal," I said, slapping Angus on the back. "I'll write a book about it one day, and spare you the details now." Jerry caught up to me on the way to our first period French class. "You got a date with her, Jim?" The gravel walkway crunch- ed underfoot. "Yeah." "What'd you say?" "What you always say," I answered, trying to sound worldly, obvious. "'What're you doing tomorrow?' 'Nothing.' 'Well, have lunch with me then.'" "A lunch date? That's not a date, that's only an hour." He wrinkled his nose as we entered the fetid old classroom where the Oldest French Teacher on Earth held court. "No, Jerry, it's a late lunch, after school. We have two hours with the late buses. We'll tell the parents that we have a Geo- metry Club meeting." "Is that where you've been? Is that what Kam was talking about?" "Yeah, she's in it too, and that's our cover story. I would've told y'all, but you asked me to stop talking about her." "So where're you going to go?" "I'm figuring the lamb place on Kuche No. Sixty-Six, the place run by the one-eyed guy." "Oh, yeah. Good food there." "Cheap, too," I agreed. The final bell rang as we were settling into our desks. "Bonjour, garçons et filles. S'il-vous plait ..." ... her voice fell off like the beat of a re- ceding tide on a gravelly beach. I opened my text and grimaced. More pronouns: Mon, ma, me, son, sa, se, lon, la, le, notre, notre, nos, votre, votre, vos, leur, leur, leur .... Having little talent for language, I have always struggled through classes on the subject, even my native tongue, and this was no different, except that now I had to suffer through a language which, though similar to Spanish, was still alien to me, despite a year and change of study. The classes took about fourteen years to pass that day, it seemed. The girl paid little attention to me in geometry, but this was to be expected, given our seat- ing, and so I thought nothing of it. We were at the Tank, the guys and I, finishing up our lunch and tossing the bull, when it suddenly fell silent. Dead silent. I rolled off my back, where I’d been lay- ing looking at the clouds, “Don’t everyone speak up at once.” And then I saw her, standing over me, as words tumbled through my head in a useless waterfall of thought. She was smiling just a little, and rocking back on her heels expectantly. “Oh. Farah. This is Jerry. Mike. Kamyar. Angus. Firoozi. Guys, this is Farah.” They all mumbled a greeting and then I saw Farah nodding at me to follow her and so I bade my friends adieu and fol- lowed. It struck me that she was getting ready to blow me off, that sh would cancel. I was going to be stood up. I took her hand anyway, to get a response, and got none; so I kept her hand and jumped in without testing the waters. “So what’s up?” “Nothing. I just wanted to come see where you hang out, and what you do. Staring at the Sun isn’t a good idea, though.” A playful smile crossed her face. We were still on, I realized, and relaxed. And as I saw her watching this happen in me, I realized she’d done this deliberately, to gauge my response. In my turn I smiled. “Wanted to visit the Asylum, eh?” “I wouldn’t have said anything, but one of your friends -- I think it was Jerry -- saw me and waved me over. Did you tell them about me?” “Well, sort of,” I answered lamely. I by-God did not want her to know I’d been swooning over her. Poor form, that, and even my ridi- culously immature instincts knew this basic rule -- never let ‘em see you sweat. We walked over to a corner of the yard next to the Administration building near a garden, and sat on the retaining wall, facing the flowers. “Sort of?” “Well, I told them I had a cute girl in my geometry club, that I was having lunch with her.” We sat next to each other on the low brick wall in front of the garden of tulips and daisies, so close I could smell her sweet, light smell, and held hands. She laughed. “Lie to your friends often?” “Every chance I get,” I answered, not skipping a beat. I was glad Kam didn’t hear that last crack of hers. “You?” “I don’t have many friends here,” she said seriously. I knew, just knew, not to joke here. She continued. “We just moved up from Shiraz in August, and I haven’t met many people yet.” I waited a little, and looked up at her. Her eyes had that sad cast again. “Move around alot?” I asked. She laughed. “You could say that. I’ve been to six schools in six years.” “Sure does suck, no?” My skin where we held hands was getting a tad clam- my, and was a touch sweaty; so I let go of her hand and laid my head on her lap, as if I’d known her for years, laying on my back along the ridge of that low retaining wall around the tulips and dai- sies, looking up at the clouds past her face the color of burnished mahogany. She looked down and our eyes met: I know. I know about this, I told her with my look. I know you know, she replied.That’s why we’re here right now. You've made a friend now, I told her silently. I felt a finger in my hair, idly twirling. “You get used to moving after a while,” she agreed. Make me forget it, her eyes asked me. Make me forget the empty gray days. Make me forget “goodbye”. Me? I’ll try. “But do you ever grow to liking it?” “C’mon,” she said, motioning for me to get up, breaking our eyelock. She took my hand and we got up and headed for the main court- yard. I could tell by the intent in her stride that we were leaving school early, and I was right. We walked the bazaar and talked and ate goje ferangi. I learned that she not only knew what American football was, she was sort of a fan. I learned that her French was much better than mine because her Dad had been in Paris as a government official before being reassigned home. He was apparently some sort of intelligence guy, but I didn’t ask. We ate lunch at the lamb place run by the one-eyed guy and reveled in the warm September afternoon, when she made a good point. “We’ll have to sneak back into school,” she said. “Huh?” “The gates,” she said. “They’re locked.” Sure enough, the gates were shut, and we’d have had to announce ourselves to the guard -- and suffer the truant policy -- if we wanted to get to our buses. She looked both ways, took my hand, and led me west along the school’s outer wall. We stayed close to the ivy. It was twenty- five after three by my watch, only twenty minutes before the first buses rolled home. There were a few buses which ran at five- thirty, one of which stopped near my house; but we’d had our afternoon early and I wanted to think a bit about it. So we hur- ried along through the ivy and turned north at the corner. Over the wall, which lost a couple of feet at the corner, I could see the rooftop of the building I should be in in that minute, the building in which I had art his- tory. I wondered what Mike was thinking, having seen me at lunch but not in class -- “Give me a boost.” “Huh?” “Give me a boost,” she repeated. We had come to the far corner of the school, and now across the wall was, I knew, the dusty, grass-free lot that passed for a soccer field at Community. I laced my fingers together, lifting her up, and noticed again the saffron aura of her perfume intermingled with light perspiration, a not-unpleasant melange. I climbed up the ivy behind her, crested the wall, and helped her down. Ten minutes left. We held hands again, with the ivy cascading over us tucked into a corner, and she lean- ed in close to me and looked up. “I really enjoyed this afternoon.” “I did too, Jim. I had fun.” “But I can’t be ditching school too often,” I cautioned. “The parental units won’t let me play football without good grades.” “I don’t know what got into me. But I learn- ed some things today.” “Like what?” “Like, you’ll follow me around if I let you,” she teased. I took on a evil leer. “Let?” She laughed, and then stood up on her toes and kissed me, and I had turned my head to the side like I had read about in Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex (But Was Afraid to Ask) and our tongues met for the first time, and I started to feel embarrassed knowing that she could most likely feel my little hard-on, what with her body pressed up against me and all. But the moment was too good to be touched by such banality and so I lost myself in another kiss. I came to somewhere in front of the office, hav- ing seen her to her bus. I was wandering around, and then a fog lifted, and I wondered what I was looking for, and then figured out that I needed to board my bus. The air was rent with the rumble of diesel engines, clouded with warm black fumes; but nothing could touch my reverie. I found my bus and got on. Some time later, I’m not sure how much so, Kamyar boarded, and sat down next to me as the bus jerked backwards and started maneu- vering out of the bus lot towards the gates. “You weren’t in Cultural Studies,” Kamyar said. “We went out,” I answered. “How was it? Have a good time?” How could I answer that question? How could I tell him that her fingers trailing through my hair felt like electrodes, that her hand felt like a warm blanket on a cold night over mine? How could I tell him how cool it was to be flicking rice across the table at a pretty girl who was flicking back just as good? What could he know about sneaking around with a gal who obviously knew a thing or two about sneaking? How doyou explain what the glis- sando of her tongue tastes like? What her eyelashes feel like on your cheek? “Yeah,” I said. “She’s a good gal.” “Sorry about the argument this morning.” He could, I think, see that something in me had changed; or perhaps it was me, merely investing his words with meanings unin- tended. “It’s cool, man. I’m sorry too. I was just nervous about today.” “I was wrong to sweat you like that, but I don’t like thinking that you’d let a girl make you lie.” “You know what?” I asked him. “What?” “She didn’t make me lie.” “What did?” he asked. “My guts. I just knew it wasn’t right to tell you guys that stuff.” “You have stupid instincts,” he teased. “I know,” I agreed, “they got me detention for tomorrow. No way I can get out of it.” “Real detention?” “Yeah, for real.” “Look at the bright side,” he said. “What bright side?” I asked. He chuckled, and spat a grape out the win- dow at a passenger on a motorcycle. It was a good shot, right behind the ear, and the guy looked up, startled, and Kam peg- ged him again, on the forehead this time. “You’ve got all day to get Jerry or Mike in trouble with you, so you ain’t gotta be alone there.” My tongue tingled where it had tasted hers. “No,” I agreed, “it won’t do at all to be alone.” |
| Posted by Thumpalumpacus - 10-17-2021, 03:08 PM |
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31. Martial Law The summer of 1978 was short and sweet, like a sugar rush. Where the days had been long and hot, the winds were now blowing in off the mountains at night, and school was getting ready to start. It had been a summer crammed with moments: We’d left El Paso, hopefully for good; I’d gotten my first drunk and my first French-kiss; I’d made first-string defensive end for the Cow- boys in Pop Warner; and those of us remain- ing Expatriates -- meaning Greg, Cory, Jerry, and I -- had mastered the art of Hell-raising. To see such a summer in your rearview mirror is a sad thing, despite autumn being my favor- ite season. I'd say I was hating life, but really I wasn't. It was just that it had been one of those times in life where you can see the magic as it happens, one of those times when you tell yourself: “Yeah. I’ll remember this forever.” Plus, being as how I was just shy of twelve years old, going back to school was like returning to the dentist -- I only did it because I absolutely had to. All too soon it was history. And when school start- ed, several things happened that were little-noted, by me at least. Perhaps I was too wrapped up in football and struggling with French class, too busy balancing the demands of school and friends and my family to notice anything outside my own lit- tle terrarium, but it seemed to me, as a foreigner, that what little I did notice in the way of unrest would pass us by, even as I watched it approach. We’d hear reports, or read them, of problems else- where, Qom, Mashad, Shiraz -- but that was like reading about problems in Detroit. Until one Friday morning, that is. I’d had a foot- ball game on Thursday, which game we'd won handily. I'd spent the night at Greg’s house, and the next morning my sister called: "Turn on the radio." "Why?" "Just turn on the radio, moron." Sis being sis, is all. "You called me up because your jam is on again? Big deal." Her voice dropped. "The Shah has declared martial law." "What's that?" I asked. "I don't know exactly," she said, “but it's screwed up." So I turned on the radio and -- bless her heart -- for once in her life my sister was right: martial law was a screwed-up thing. For the native popu- lace, only students in class and workers at work could gather more than three at a time. Day-to- day operations of the news media were subject to Ministry of Information censorship. Most chillingly, a dusk-to-dawn curfew was imposed, and enforced by Army patrols. Martial-fucking-law. I knew what it was now. The summer seemed more distant than ever, and thus started the ruination of the rest of the year. Nineteen seventy-eight was one of those magical years that are particularly magical because you are aware of the magic while it lives -- I figure I'm lucky to have seen it from that vantage -- but invariably the magic peters out. Or it’s done in. In this case, it was done in by a concaten- ation of events well beyond the control of any one person. And so when I fielded this parti- cular phone call from Susan on that sunny Oct- ober morning, I knew: summer was over, and winter follows autumn. |
| Posted by Thumpalumpacus - 10-10-2021, 04:19 PM |
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30. Ladyfingers It wasn’t long after I made the Cowboys that the unrest started up. It started in the northeastern part of the country, in the religious city of Mashad, and spread from there. Of course, it had been an ongoing affair of sorts, but I’m relating only the last phase of the rebellion. There had been unrest directed against the Pahlevi regime ever since his father had sub- mitted to the will of the Allies in the Second World War and eliminated Nazi influence, and permitted the use of the country’s rail lines for Allied transshipments to Russia -- a move for which the nationalist Iranians never forgave him. The Mossadegh affair, where the CIA returned the Shah to the throne fol- lowing a very unpopular bloodless countercoup, had further inflamed the rebellion; and the Shah’s move to Westernize his country, to leave Sharia’a, or Islamic law, behind, added the decisive counterweight to his rule in the form of the clergy. Thereafter Reza Shah Pah- levi II’s regime was doomed, and his last twenty years in power were spent fighting an off-and-on revolt. In August of ‘78, the revolt was on again. This time there was no quenching the blaze. Of course, to us Americans, it seemed remote, and at first it was. Mashad, after all, was over four hundred miles from Teheran; and when you’re eleven years old, that may as well be four hundred light-years. Other disturbances unset- tled other provinces. Kermanshah, Shiraz, and Esfahan were all hotbeds of revolt, to believe the Teheran Journal; and even Kayhan, the Go- vernment-sponsored paper, admitted the unrest. This did have some interest for us, but it was only interesting to us as an abstraction, like reading about a hurricane. The weight of the situation could not be properly conveyed. And even if it were, were we disposed to judge the gravity of the times? It was against this backdrop that Cory returned from his family’s vacation in the middle of August, if one may call time spent in Chicago a vacation. (Most people I know would refer to time spent in Illinois as a stretch, as in: “I did a stretch in Joliet”. I sure do; I did a stretch near Champaign on join- ing the Air Force). It was a hot afternoon, over a hundred degrees, when he called me up and said he’d be right over. “You wanna head over to the American club?” I asked. “Naw, I got some stuff you need to see.” “What stuff?” “How do you keep a dumbass in suspense?” he asked. “Huh?” “I’ll tell you when I get there.” Click. Hmph. An hour later, I heard his battered Puchs pull up outside and I buzzed him into the courtyard. I was curious what the hell he was on about with that “suspense” nonsense, but I didn’t let on, and when he asked about the football pads on my bed, I gave him the full scoop about the Cowboys. Being a Yankee, he had no proper appreciation for the art and science of football, and I could see him during my explication burn- ing to show me this stuff of his. I played it cool, until it was jumping out of him. I took my time explaining all about blitzes and practice camps and wishbones. “So you wanna see what I got?” “Yeah, why not?” Still cool. He opened up his backpack and pulled out a bag with a large square object -- rather, several of them -- and reaching into it, he pulled out one, wrapped in rice paper and covered with ideo- grams on a yellow sticker, on which the words “Black Cats” were emblazoned. Throwing that on my bed, he reached in again, and out came another, slightly larger package, this one labeled “Ladyfingers”. I looked at the treasures he’d retrieved, and then met his wickedly gleaming eyes with my own. Unspoken visions of mayhem danced between us in that instant, and our syn- chronicity of thought was evident. Here was pre- packaged shock, an exciting afternoon in a brick. Here were firecrackers. Altogether Cory had brought over six bricks, three apiece of each type. The Black Cats were large, about a pencil’s width in diameter and about an inch-and-a-half long, and wrapped in black paper bearing the white stencil of a jump- ing cat. Each brick had two hundred fifty Black Cats. The Ladyfingers were smaller, shorter, and wrapped in plain red paper; they came four hundred to a brick, according to the “cuont” printed on the packaging. Altogether, we had almost two thousand firecrackers laying on my bed. “Are they any good?” I asked. “Yeah, they are, especially the Ladyfingers,” he replied. “You’d think with them being smaller they’d be weaker, but that’s not so. The have a lot of oomph. But --” “But?” “But they have fast fuses. Very fast fuses.” “Fast?” “Yeah. I almost lost a hand to one back home.” “Yeah, right.” I was obviously skeptical. “No, seriously, man. The son-of-a-bitch went like that.” He snapped his fingers. “I suppose I’ll see one day.” “Let’s go.” I looked at him. “Where to?” “Hmm. Good question.” We both pondered the issue for a moment, and then he looked up at me, grinning from ear to ear. “The jube.” We were at the bottom of the huge jube around the corner from my house in ten minutes with about a hundred firecrackers. Cory tossed me a strip of Ladyfingers and I detached one, carefully unlacing the fuse so I wouldn’t tear it off. Got out my Zippo, lit it up -- Jesus Christ, but he was right! The thing went off fast. I don’t think it took half-a-second to burn down and cook off; I barely had time to re- gister that it was faster than I thought, and I drop- ped it. It exploded before it hit the ground. Fast. Cory was holding his sides and laughing at me. “That look on your face was worth it,” he choked. “I told you they were fast.” “We gotta figure out a way to slow them down, or else they’ll be useless.” “Whaddya mean? They’ll still blow stuff up.” “Yeah, but these things are probably illegal here. If we want to blow up the right stuff, we’ll need to be a ways away. Unless you want to be caught, of course.” He pondered that for a moment, a dark look pas- sing across his freckled features. “You thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked. “I’m thinking about those guards in the park,” I re- plied. “I’m thinking that they probably have for- gotten what I look like.” “Mayhap they have,” Cory said quaintly as he flip- ped our battered cassette of Rubber Soul over in my blaster. “But how can we slow down these fuses?” Once again we were lost in thought for a minute or two, to the strains of “Nowhere Man”. “The brick-fuses -- we can tie them together and make a really long fuse,” Cory said. “The light will jump the knots.” “Yeah,” I agreed morosely, “But we only have six long fuses, and how much will they slow it down anyway?” “You got a better idea?” “Maybe,” I said. My mind reflected back to the grassfires that would happen on the prairie in North Texas. I remember the newsmen always mentioning drought and dryness when they spoke about how fast the fire spread; and it was a short leap of logic to conclude that if dry stuff burned quicker, then damp stuff burned slower. I said as much to Cory, who immediately dunked a fire- cracker -- fuse and all -- in jube-water and tried to light it, unsuccessfully, of course. “You’re right,” he announced solemly. “Wet fuses burn slower.” “Listen, dingleberry, let’s try damp before we get to wet.” “How do we get it damp but not wet?” “I don’t know,” I shrugged. We spent the rest of the afternoon at the boyish pasttime of lighting off the very-fast bomblets, having pushed the immediate problem of speed reduction to the back of our minds, until we start- ed to get nervous about the locals hearing us. Then we headed beck to my flat where we ga- thered up my money and went to the American Club, at the other end of Zafar, where it inter- sected Pahlevi, and we spent the afternoon play- ing pinball and one-armed bandits. I tore up the pinball machine “Eight Ball”, winning six or so games in the process, but lost most of what money I’d brought in the slots, which were mighty unfriendly that day. It wasn’t until a couple of days later that I was wiping steam off the mirror after a shower when the solution to our fusing problem hit me: a good, portable source of dampness was breath. So I called up Hansen and we got together for experi- ments, which showed we were on the right track -- breathing on a fuse usually added about three seconds to its burn time. This still wasn’t enough -- we’d get caught running -- but it was heartening. Cory also had some good ideas simmering regard- ing the use of this knowledge, and so while we hung out and lit off the occasional Ladyfinger, which we now preferred due to their being much more reliable, if more dangerous, we brainstormed ideas about capers. Then we returned to my apart- ment and dissected one of our rounds, and that was when we achieved our breakthrough. In essence a firecracker is a tiny pipe-bomb, with the pipe being made of cardboard and not metal. The construction is very simple and yielded little knowledge to us; but when we examined a fuse for the first time, well, that was a different story. The fuse is not simply a piece of thick paper that burns down to nothing before the whole thing goes she-bang. It is actually a very fine piece of tissue paper impregnated with gunpowder and twisted tightly. We learned through trial-and-error that the gunpowder was required in a fuse, that if it wasn’t present then the spark would die out. More importantly, we learned that the speed at which the fuse burned was pretty much propor- tional to the amount of gunpowder the fuse held, that if we reduced the amount of powder we lengthened the burn time in a more-or-less controlled manner. And we learned that be- tween powder and dampness, we could pretty much make it do what we wanted. We spent the rest of the day down in the jube examining various facets of this behavior. Plans could now be laid. I spent the night over at Cory’s house the last Thursday of that summer. We spent the evening shooting bumper pool in his den, mostly, and though he’d told me that a female neighbor of his had the habit of undressing in front of an open window, she put on no show on this par- ticular evening in question; so we went “snoop- ing and pooping “, as we called it, around the neighborhood, honing our skill at stealth; and we finalized plans for a small caper on the mor- row in Pahlevi Park across the street, which we knew would be crowded. We were wrong. It was the boulevard that was crowded. We got our first close-up of a demon- stration. The singing from the minarets was something I’d only recently come to appreciate. My West- ern ears had always before thought of Middle Eastern melody as discordant and uncivilized, but upon learning a little musical sense, I could hear the intent in the music, and as in any art, intent defines the success or failure of the art in question. Thus I was able to judge to a truer standard than my previously stilted yardstick. That is to say, I was starting to like it. So I was listening to the singers singing in the minarets as the congregation left the mosque, and didn’t notice immediately that the pattern of crowd be- havior was abnormal. They were not heading home, or to the market, or to the park. They stayed near the mosque, crowding near the door, apparently listening to a harangue being issued there. The murmur of the crowd was almost subliminal -- I was still focused on the singer in the spire -- but the sussurating sound eventually impressed itself on me as I sat on the balcony and smok- ed my first cigarette of the day -- Cory’s pa- rents being still asleep. The morning sun couldn’t reach the crowd gathered below, sheltered as it was in the shadows of the surrounding buildings, but up on the balcony it was warming already. The smell of fresh- baked barbari bread wafted up to me from the vendors’ stalls below; but the crowd by now had captivated my attention, and Cory’s as well when he joined me. “What’s up with them?” he asked “Hell, I don’t know,” I replied. “They seem pissed about something.” "I hope they don’t screw up our plan,” he said, drawing roughly on his Marlboro. “I don’t think that’ll happen,” I said, looking back inside in case his parents woke up. “They won’t stay there all day.” “But do you want to have to find out?” “Seems to me we don’t have a say.” “Well, yeah. But I want some fun this morning.” “We’ll have fun,” I reassured him. “We may just have to wait. Or run bigger risks.” His parents woke up two cigarettes later, and still the crowd was there in front of the church. The park was empty; either the regular park-goers were in the mosque crowd, or scared off by them. Whichever was the case, we had no audience for the caper we had planned, and without an au- dience, what performer is inspired? The guy in front of the church was inspired, though. He played the crowd masterfully, lifting them up, bringing them low, occasion- ally getting an “Allah-u akhbar” -- “God is great” -- from them; and amongst his listen- ers we now noticed some policemen in riot gear. They stood at the edge of the crowd at parade-rest watching impassively as they were excoriated by the harangue up front. The mood of the crowd was getting a bit ugly. We both, Cory and I, wanted to smoke, but with his parents in the room behind us, we couldn’t. That was the excuse we told our- selves for going down into that street. We had no excuses for taking the sixteen Ladyfingers with specially prepared fuses. We crept through the alley running behind his apartment building, along the way spying a fire escape we could use to mount the roof and observe the effects of our prank. Near the mouth of the alley we emptied two gal- vanized trashcans and laid them over on their sides. We were now near Pahlevi, and so we stashed the cans next to the rear of a building, and crept out onto the thorough- fare as inconspicuously as possible. The crowd was restive, and though some demonstrators noticed us, they paid no special attention; the anti-Western senti- ments later aroused by the revolt weren’t in full force yet, or perhaps these being the more devout Muslims, they had no wish to harm us -- yet. At any rate, the ones who noticed us paid no special attention, and so our freedom of movement was unimpeded. The press of people and the unsettled mur- mur of shuffling feet and suspenseful and yet impassioned speech filled our ears as we scattered our lit rounds randomly on the sidewalk at the rear of the disturbance. We had to work quickly for, though we knew we had some time with these delayed fuses, they were by no means precise, and were liable to go off anytime past about four or five minutes. We wanted to be completely clear of the area when they went off; our plan was to watch from a rooftop. Plus, we didn’t know how long the policemen would have their atten- tion held forward; they might look back at any moment. We had to hurry up top before they noticed anything awry. This we managed. We lit and planted our last two in those trash cans, but not before clipping off a bit of their fuses, so that they’d go off sooner, and then dashed up the fire es- cape we’d scouted out earlier. We attained the rooftop and had settled low against the parapet to watch the proceedings quietly, and lit up the smokes for which we had left his apartment. We knew the neighborhood pret- ty well around here, and had an escape route planned that would keep us above street level for our entire getaway. The first firecracker to go off we had planted in the alley, in a glass bottle which we had hop- ed would shatter. It didn’t, and so the report was muffled, as was the second; but the third was one we had planted in a trashcan, and when it sounded off -- ka-whump -- the crowd paused for a moment, and then people broke and ran. The police radios started crackling, and the troop below us drew arms and took cover, a couple directly below us. This was something we hadn’t considered, and we watch- ed what had been a peaceful demonstration gain a little chaos, and then two more of our firecrack- ers sounded off. Now people started panicking and for the first time I began to feel fear for our thoughtless action and the result it seemed to be achieving. How many were left? Two gendarmes with M-16s took up position at the entrance to the alley, ready to spray lead into it, as two more started slowly clear- ing it; at this point, I was praying for one of our more distant rounds to fire, as a distraction. I didn’t fancy the thought of roofhopping with those cops keyed up and ready to shoot, but we couldn’t stay put -- they were sure to examine fire ladders -- and so we started back towards Cory’s apartment. “C’mon, Jim!” “Hey, did you raise the ladder on the fire escape?” “No. Hurry up!” he hissed. “No? What the Hell were you thinking? You might as well have left fucking directions!” “I don’t recall you saying too much about it,” he glowered as we hopped over the far parapet and onto the adjoining building. Another round sounded, and then the other trashcan round, and as Cory sprinted across the second roof I ran to the edge and checked the alley below. The most of the troop was still at the mouth of the alley, taking cover, but four were inside it, two standing under fire escapes -- including the one we’d used -- one peering into a dumpster, and one talking into a walkie-talkie. None of them saw me and so I drew back quickly. “Shit, Jim, hurry the Hell up already!” Cory growled, but I needed no urging as I reported what I’d seen. We hopped down to the next roof, which was fifteen or so feet below us -- the thuds produced by our landings simply screamed “Catch us!” -- and clambered down a drainpipe into a sheltered courtyard where we ran along the top of a tall brick wall that led to the building next to Cory’s where we swung onto his second floor balcony from the dividing wall. We could see guards running up the steps of Pahlevi Park, and people spilling into the side street in front of his apartment, and then our eyes met and I could see that he was as scared as I was. What had we started? The unrest continued for several hours. We saw a couple of people clubbed, and several more arrested, but mainly it seemed to peter out, rather than being snuffed. Two more rounds of ours sounded off -- one a whole seventeen minutes after we reached the bal- cony! -- as well as a couple of reports much louder, guns, possibly? The police were high- ly active around his place, and when we check- ed back down the alley an hour or so later, we saw that the trashcans we’d used were being examined, and so we slunk back upstairs be- fore we were seen. Us having never seen firec- rackers in Iran before, we were certain that if they discovered the remnants and saw us Amer- ican kids out, they’d put two and two together. The Saturday newspaper I picked up on the way to school had a page-three story on the demonstration we’d seen, but nothing was mentioned of our Ladyfingers, nor arrests, for that matter. To believe the Kayhan, it was merely a rally that might’ve been government- approved, so far as could be told from the article. It mentioned nothing about the anger the demon- strators showed to the cops. It mentioned noth- ing of the beatings we’d seen. It was as if the article were describing an entirely different event than that which we’d witnessed -- or perhaps .instigated? Of course, the Kayhan was the government-sponsored paper. It was then that the revolt began to make sense to me. The next couple of days we spent reviewing the last bit of summer vacation, looking back longingly. Football practice took up some of my time, and Cory came over and kicked back one afternoon after a particularly gruel- ing practice. I was beat, aching from head to toe, as we sat out on my balcony. “JJ, what’s up for tonight?” “Me, I’m gonna relax,” I replied. “I’m thrashed.” “Yeah, I bet you are,” he laughed. Then his face turned serious for a moment. “You know what I heard, man?” “What?” “One of my neighbors told my dad that three people died on Friday morning.” “Holy shit.” “Do you think it had something to do with us?” “I don’t know, Cory,” I lied. He knew I was lying. “I think it did,” he said. “I think that if we hadn’t done that shit then the police wouldn’t have freaked out, you know? Everything was fine until we pulled that stuff.” “Don’t place too much importance on us,” cautioned him, but we both knew my words were hollow. Everything was fine until those Ladyfingers went off. He looked at me serenely, eyebrows only slightly arched. “You don’t believe that,” he finally said. “You know as well as I do that we lit more than firecrackers the other day.” He shook a Marlboro out, packed it against his lighter, and lit up. “So what do we do?” I asked. “What can we do?” he shot back. I had no answer. “Anyway,” he continued, “we have to get rid of those firecrackers.” “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” I agreed. “How should we do it?” Our eyes met, and then he spoke. “The park, not the street,” he said, and we both laughed. |
| Posted by Thumpalumpacus - 10-03-2021, 03:20 PM |
|
29. Junior The kid across the hall was getting on my nerves something fierce. I was sitting in the stairwell, minding my own business, trying to go over the plans for the 1:600-scale model of the U.S.S. Arizona I’d just bought, and it was looking to be a hard build, and this new kid just would not shut up. Judging from the whiny tenor of his voice, he was nine, maybe ten, tops, and he was apparently driving his mom up the wall, too, for I heard her snap “Yes, you can go to the store!” and then his bickery voice let out a cheer before the door swung wide open and he charged out into the hallway; on seeing me he stopped. “Hi,” I said, looking up from my plans. “Hi,” he replied, and held out his hand. “I’m Fred Gossage, Junior.” “I’m Jim,” I replied, standing to shake his hand. Fred Gossage looked nothing like his voice. He was big, a full four inches taller than I was, and with a spare tire already laying plans for his mid- riff. Random strands of straight brown hair were plastered sweatily to his olive skin. “You’re new,” he said, inspecting me closely with his big round face. “Well, no,” I said. “We’ve lived here for over three years now. We just got back from my Dad’s school in Texas.” His face wrinkled at the mention of my home state, as if he’d bitten into a wormy apple. This didn’t bode well for our relations at all, but I was trying to be nice. “Hmmm, you build models too, I see.” “Yup,” I said. “This one looks to be long in building, though.” “Oh, the Arizona’s easy,” he corrected. “Now the U.S.S. Missouri, that’s a rough one.” “I didn’t have a problem with that,” I responded. “No lattice mast. I’ve got the 1:480 in my room -- you wanna come see it?” “Sure,” he chirped. God, that was annoying, the way he had a chirpy voice. He looked on dumbly as I began doffing my shoes. “Yeah, my parents don’t allow shoes in the house.” “What are they, Oriental?” I leveled my blue eyes at him. “Yes, I’m Korean.” “Really?” “Yes, I was born in Pusan. Now take your shoes off, and let’s go look at that boat.” “No. I don’t take my shoes off unless I’m at home.” “You are at home.” I nodded at his door. “Not in there.” He nodded in turn at my door. “And, you could just bring your boat out.” “Except that it’s in a display, and that’s a good way to break a model anyway, moving it around. Look, how about we just get our soldiers and fight on my hill outside?” I offered. (I had built a for- tified hill of baked mud in the courtyard, and used it to fight toy soldiers, pinging them with ball-bear- ings shot from my wrist-rocket). “You do have sol- diers, right?” “Yeah, but let’s go to the store first, ‘kay? That’s what I was bugging my mom about anyway. I got lost the last time I went.” “Well, I know the neighborhood well,” I replied. I put my shoes back on, and we started down the stairs . . . across the courtyard and out the gate. “So how do you like the country so far?” I asked, trying to make conversation. “I don’t. It stinks. The food sucks. The people are dumb. It’s dirty here--” he wrinkled his face again “--and there’s nothing to do.” Oh brother, I could see for sure that I wasn’t going to like this guy -- but I tried to give him a chance. I really did. “Have you been on a company trip yet? The Ameri- can Club? Or to the CRC?” I asked, referring to the Community Recreation Center around the corner on Old Shemiran Road. “No, what’s that?” “Well, there’s something to do right there. They have an arcade, movie theater, a bowling alley, two swimming pools, and three slot-car tracks. It’s a gas there.” “Sounds cool,” he said. “Maybe we can go there later.” We rounded another corner and were at Mr. Hashemi’s store. Kuche Hashemi was crowded that day, which on top of being a tiny little hole-in-the-wall, gave it a fetid, claustrophobic feel. It was a dim little shoe- box of a store, with one postered-over window and no ventilation, but it was owned by a friendly eccen- tric English-speaking Persian. We’d had Mr. Hashemi over for a couple of barbeques since returning, and had named him an Honorary Texan. He spied me out immediately. “Jim!” From his mouth my name came out “Yim”, which always made me laugh. “Slap some skin, my friend.” I high-fived and down-lowed him; he too-slowed me and poked my ribs. “You got me!” I cried out, clutching my ribs, keeling over to the floor dramatically. “Yim, who’s your friend?” “Mr. Hashemi, this is Fred Gossage,” I answered, getting up. “Junior. Fred Gossage Junior.” “He’s a new neighbor of mine. Fred, this is Mr. Hashemi; he owns the store.” Hashemi stuck out a hand across the counter, knocking over a Tic-Tac display rack, which he deftly caught with his other hand, grinning all the while. Fred eye- balled his outstretched hand dubiously for a mo- ment before shaking it quickly and letting loose. “How’s your Mom & Dad, Yim?” “A pain in the rear, as usual, thanks,” I called over my shoulder as I headed to the soda cooler and pulled two Pepsis out. “And yours?” I replied in our mock-serious pleasantries. “The same,” he laughed. “Always wanting things, and trying to run my life.” I put our two sodas up on the counter and pulled out a hundred-rial note. “Gossage,” I called out, “pay up.” I heard no reply, and didn’t see him any- where, so I paid for his soda too, took one of the two twenty-five-rial coins of my change, and left the other on the counter as a tip. “Your other tip,” I teased Hashemi, “is to brush your teeth.” As I turned to leave, something pegged me in the head, and as I bent down to pick up a piece of gum, Hash nailed me with another one. “That’s one’s for Fred,” he called out. “You stay out of trouble now.” “Thanks, Hash. See you later.” Fred wasn’t anywhere nearby, so I started home, keeping my eyes open for him, and halfway hoping not to find him. He caught sight of me as I was getting ready to head up Fifth Street, and his spare tire jostled ponderously as he ran to catch up to me. He had a Cadbury bar in hand, one of the giant ones with caramel filling. “Where’d you go?” I asked. “Out.” “I didn’t see you pay for that.” “Nope, you sure didn’t. Want a piece?” “Take it back. Now.” “No.” “Now, Fred.” “No, Jim,” he retorted. “Whatcha gonna do? Fink me off?” “I just might, yeah. Don’t steal from my friends.” “Do it then, I don’t care. He’s just a towelhead anyway,” he said smugly before biting off a big hunk of chocolate. I fought down the sudden urge to punch his smarmy face. “Fine, sucker, I will. Hope you can find your way home.” He paused in his dis- play of gluttony for a moment, and then I left him standing there. But when I got back inside Hashemi’s, I found I didn’t want to rat Fred out. I cannot really say why; perhaps I didn’t want to alienate a fellow American in the foreign country, I didn’t want to get him in trouble. Perhaps I didn’t want the shame of explaining -- or trying to explain -- his actions to my friend. Perhaps I was just chicken. No matter the reason, when I got back to Kuche Hashemi, I merely pretended to have forgotten some tomatoes, and so I paid up without saying anything about Fred’s pilfering. As I left again, I saw Fred keeping a close watch for me, shadowing me. That suited me fine, as now I could get him thoroughly lost before I ditch- ed him. So when I got to Fifth Place, I turned left instead of right, and then right, down Alley Osimir until I got to Farouk Road, where I lost him in the mini-bazaar before cutting over to Old Shemiran Road and taking the roundabout way home. I was almost done building my model a few hours later when I heard his mother chewing him out in the courtyard below. We spent the next week avoiding each other. He somehow found the CRC, for I saw him there a couple of times, but we exchanged no words, and that suited me fine. I was satisfied that my first impression of him was a correct one; I did not like Fred Gossage, Junior. Besides, Cory and Greg and I were busy tearing up the city to a soundtrack of Boston, the Beatles, Kiss, Led Zeppelin, and ELO. And the four of us, Leb included, made plans to catch the company bus to Shahanshah Lake. Shahanshah Lake -- the name was Farsi, and means “King of Kings” -- was a small artificial lake nestled in the foothills of the Elburz Moun- tains overlooking Teheran, not too far from eighteen-thousand-foot Mount Damevand. A small cofferdam held the waters of several snowmelt streams, creating a broad, open lake with several narrow inlets. My dad’s company ran monthly buses up to the lake, where one could hike, fish, and rent boats for two hundred rials an hour. So the four of us laid plans to stock up on grapes, goge ferangi, and water balloons, and then to sail the lake and terrorize any and all innocent vic- tims -- a time-honored Expatriate Pastime, laid to rest though the Expats might be. And while I was at Mr. Hashemi’s, buying my share of the ammu- nition, I told Mr. Hashemi about Fred’s previous theft, and tried to pay for it. Hashemi would hear none of it, but I did manage to leave an overly large tip. I left his store feeling even more ashamed of and an- gry at Fred Gossage, Junior. The entire trip to the lake, with him sitting fifteen or so feet away, was uncomfortable; we each main- tained a tense mutual silence, until he joined a game of “spot the Bug”, when his brays of delight became annoyingly loud. Greg, Jerry, and Cory all got on near the end of our route, making the most of my trip long and boring; but when they did board we lit up the back of the bus with laughter over the victims we were soon to garner. Fred put on an an- noyed face but said little. Once we got to the lake, the busload of kids split into groups. My friends and I headed first to the snack bar and then to the rental shack, where we rented what was essentially a day-cruiser: four seats, an outboard motor, and a windshield if you were lucky. That day we were unlucky and thus got no windshield. Because we’d put up the money for the boat rental, Greg and I played rock-paper-scissors (sangh- hogaskhe-che in Farsi) to see who got to captain the boat first. We intended to alternate every thirty minutes. He won, and we imme- diately started looking for trouble, fetching up first on an island in the middle of the lake where we could fill our balloons unobtrusively in the rest- room. We could also scout out the lake for good targets on this fine summer day. The blazing June sun had driven quite a crowd to the lake, and we espied plenty of targets from our central vantage point. Our first targets were a couple of teenage boys in a paddle-boat lolling near the island; but as we set up to make our delivery, a blue launch carrying Fred, Steve Dietrich, and Tony Alberg dashed in and showered our target with grapes. As our prospective targets sped off under a wel- ter of fire, Greg spun our boat out of the way and we looked on in dismay as the others laughed loudly at their coup. “Those assholes!” Cory called out. “They stole our goddamned target!” “It could just be a mistake,” I said. “Oh, that’s no mistake,” said Jerry. “They did that on purpose.” “Yeah, Jim. They did that on purpose.” I looked at Greg. “Well,” I said, “you’re the captain. What do you say we do?” “I say we find another target and tear it up!” he cried. A chorus of agreement echoed his rallying cry, and so we set off again. We soon found a mother and her two young sons on the lakeshore, enjoying a picnic. I thought with thinly felt re- morse how shameful it was to be busting up their idyllic afternoon; then I hefted a couple of water- balloons, testing their weight, and braced my knees against the side of the boat, lining up my first target -- the older boy’s plate of food -- as Greg slowed the boat down to a stealthy crawl, which also helped our aim. “Ready,” he hissed. “Aim --” And then they charged into our field of fire again, spraying our target with grapeshot, laughing loud- ly, Fred and Tony and Steve. I have to give them credit, they did one helluva job, for the family we had been targeting were now scooting up the bank away from the hail of flying fruit -- although the elder boy had picked up his own bag of goge ferangi and was returning fire, if ineffectively. Greg again throttled up and turned away from the melee. And as he did, Fred Gossage, Junior stood up in his boat, looked squarely at us, and shot us the Bird on both hands. Then he pointed and laughed as Tony sped up and they cruised on as well. “Those rat-bastards! They’re stealing our victims,” Cory fumed. “And did you see that asshole flip us off?” asked Greg. “Let the sonsabitches do it again,” I chimed in. “We’ll nail them as they do!” “Oh no,” said Jerry, suddenly. “I’ve got a better idea than that.” “Better than tagging them?” retorted Greg. “I kinda like Jim’s idea myself.” “Well,” replied Leb, “I noticed a funny boat out on the lake earlier, near the island.” He had everyone’s attention now. “It wasn’t painted any differently or anything, but it had the word ‘security’ written in Farsi on the side.” “I’m not a rat,” Cory spat out. “Screw that.” “Yeah,” I said, flashing back ironically to my inability to give Mr. Hashemi the scoop, “I’m no fink.” “No, no! Just shut up! What, am I the only smart guy on this boat?” he asked, looking around. “Check this out.” A wicked gleam entered his eyes, and his normally happy face now wore a devilish grin. I’d never seen my friend of two years look so . . . Amer- ican. “We set up on this Plain-Jane boat like we’re going to nail it. Then they swoop in and bomb it. They get busted themselves, no help from us -- the cops get wet, and we get to laugh at both of them.” Greg whistled. “Holy shit,” said Cory. “Jerry, that’s good.” Nods of approval all around. I spoke. “They don’t have any water balloons. If we want it to be good, we’re going to have to give them some of ours.” “There’s that,” Leb said, looking at the ten or twelve water bombs we had in our cooler. “But if they show that they’ll do it, I call four balloons a small price to pay.” Cory ran a hand through his greasy blonde hair, a nervous habit of his. “There they are now,” he said, and started handing sandwiches all around. “Make like we’re eating lunch, and let me do the talking.” “I’d rather just eat,” Greg cracked dryly. “You can skip the yapping.” We all laughed. “What’s so funny?” called Tony Alberg from the other boat. “We were just laughing about you guys nailing every- one,” Cory answered. “Hey, you guys got a couple of sodas?” “Yeah.” At that, Steve leaned down into their boat and fetched up a Pepsi. “What’s it worth to ya?” “You give us two,” Cory offered, “and we’ll give you four water balloons.” “Six balloons, that’s two for each of us,” he countered. “Five.” They consulted for a moment. “Deal.” And the barter was carried off. Greg couldn’t resist the urge to crack wise. “Maybe now you guys can really get someone. Grapes are just so weenie.” “Yeah?” Fred asked. “You guys haven’t gotten too many water balloons off at all that I’ve seen. In fact, I haven’t seen one of yours land.” He smirked. “You’ll see, Ju-u-u-nior,” I taunted, drawing out the last word. Being my turn at the helm, I slid in behind the wheel and throttled up, calling over my shoulder: “See ya, wouldn’t want to be ya.” We were finishing up our lunch and quaffing cold Pepsis when five minutes later we found that security boat. The Three Stooges, predictably, were lurking nearby, being obviously nonchalant as we mocked our setup. And, as Leb had predicted, they suddenly revved up their boat, and charged in between us and the security boat, pelting the occupants with grapes before capping off their demonstration with two water balloons, which burst squarely between the two occupants in the target boat. As this happened, I laid the wheel over, not to flee, as Greg had done, but to close; and at the same time I goosed the throttle so that we gave them a good shove on the gunwales, pushing them forward and trap- ping them between the cops and the shore. Pointing and laughing at their predicament, we roared off as they jumped overboard in a vain attempt to evade capture. Their clothes were still wet and muddy when they climbed aboard the bus for the ride home, and we greeted them with a chorus of laughter. “You shoulda brought swimtrunks if you planned on swimming,” cracked Greg. “How was it at the police hut?” asked Cory. We all laughed again. “You guys did that on purpose!” shot Tony angrily. “Gee,” said Jerry, “whatever gave you that idea?” More chuckles. The bus jolted to a start. “Don’t think this is over, chumps,” snarled Steve. He pushed his bifocals up his large nose. His red hair was matted muddily against his forehead, and he had, unbeknownst to him, some moss above his right ear. “You babies will pay for this.” “Yeah,” chipped in Fred. “And I’m gonna make that little towelhead start paying right now.” He got up out of his seat and started advancing on Jerry. I knew now, suddenly, why I hated Fred Gossage; not only was he a snob, a dork, but he was a god- damned racist, and I knew as I rose to throw it that he had my sucker-punch to his solar plexus coming to him, in spades. His soft gut yielded before my fist and, as if in slow motion, he crumpled over double and sank to his knees with tears springing from the corner of his eyes. I stared at him silentl- y, stunned at the ease of my victory, and then snarl- ed, “Sit down, Junior.” The others were all looking on in wonder --I’m not much the fighting type, despite the few that I’ve recounted in this book -- and Tony Alberg’s eyes were as big as fifty-rial pieces at the improvement I’d made in my punching since he last had seen a demonstration. Steve, perhaps anticipating a gene- ral scuffle, was fumbling with his glasses trying to pocket them. The air on the bus was oppressively hot. “Anybody else want to try some paybacks?” I asked. I looked around. There were no takers. The bus motor coughed loudly in the silence. Jerry was looking at me with an annoyed scowl. Fred clam- bered to his feet slowly, only to be thrown to the deck again as the driver brought the bus to a halt. “You kids back to seats,” he called back in broken English. As I returned to my seat, Jerry glared at me. “I can fight my own damned fights, James. I may be little,” he said, “but I’m tough.” “I know, Jerry. Until he called you a ‘towelhead’, you were on your own. I just couldn’t help myself after that.” “Man,” he replied in a tone that was almost patron- izing, “if I had a hundred rials for every time I’d been slurred by an American, we’d be riding in my limo, not this crappy old bus. You Americans talk a good word about equality and all, but talk is cheap.” “Yeah, ain’t that the truth. But Jerry?” “What?” “If you want to beat me to the punch, you simply must speed up.” I gave my best bob-and-weave, and threw on my Ali hiss. “ ‘Cause I float like a butterfly, but I sting like a bee.’” |
| Posted by SYZ - 09-27-2021, 04:13 AM |
| LOL... "dustier than a shelf-full of Liberace records" |
| Posted by Thumpalumpacus - 09-26-2021, 01:30 PM |
|
**************** 1978 **************** 28. Seven Pools We had arrived back in-country in May of 1978. By now, settling into new digs was old hat for us. It was a fine spring day when Raytheon’s beat-up Mer- cedes cargo truck brought out our household from storage, covered in dust and reeking of mothballs, and we set to work reconstructing the life we'd had before we'd accompanied Dad back Stateside for his school. I curled up in my beanbag and reacquainted myself with my old books, mostly a collection of Jack London, the Hardy Boys, and military nonfiction, along with a set of Encyclopædia Americana. I sat at my desk, covered with splotches of model paint, with my old mess still in the drawers. I set up my beat-up old stereo and counted up my available funds, which had gone into storage as well -- twenty-two hundred rials saved up for important times. Such times were upon me now, as I picked up the phone and started making calls. I knew it was point- less to call Mike and Leb and Kamyar; our school -- Community -- was still in session and would be for another two weeks or so, and so they were unavail- able for good times as yet. So I called Greg and Cory (they went to our cross-town rivals TAS, which had let out already) and found out that while Cory was still living in his old digs, not far from my old apart- ment, Greg was planted in a new squat, some flats about five miles from me. Thus Greg, being about nine miles closer, was honored by my first return visit. He hadn't changed in the five months it'd been since we'd seen each other, when the Porteii, as we plural- ized them, left El Paso; still freckled and sandy-haired, with his huge overbite and pallid skin. We fell natur- ally back into our backslapping and ribbing, and after twenty minutes I felt like I'd not missed him at all. All the old jokes came flooding back, as stale and as funny as ever. We were back to bombing the natives with grapes from our speeding bicycles, and all was good. I learned that Cory Hansen’s phone number had changed. It was then also that I learned of the party. Apparently Dad's company had planned a weekend trip to a local retreat called Seven Pools, for the teenage children of the employees. Being only eleven years old, I was too young to make the trip -- but I sure could hit the going-away party, which held forth the promise of bringing together most every American kid in Teheran -- or at least those worth a damn. When I got home I hit the phones, and in short order I had added six or seven of my friends to the roster of attendees. I also learned that not only would my sister be at the party, but she would go on the camping trip too -- good news indeed. I got ahold of Leb and Mike and Kam over the week- end, and secured their attendance too at the party. When I finally got a hold of Cory Hansen, he immed- iately hung up on me, jumped on his moped, rode the 14 miles across town, and we picked up our hell- raising where we'd left off. His battered Puchs mo- ped was our ticket to freedom. That year Spring may've come late to me, but boy, was it vibrant. In the tale of my times, ‘78 holds a special place. The Wednesday of the party had finally rolled around, and, trying to conserve my money for more useful things than cab fare, I rode my bike the five miles over to Greg’s flat to help set things in order. The Porteii lived in a four-story building with the Waldens, the Copenhavers, and one other American family whose name I no longer remember. The entrance to this building was a long driveway, about two hundred feet long, which sloped down to an underground parking garage about one hundred and sixty foot square and supported by columns. This was to be the site of our soiree. It needed a lot of work. Being below ground level, it was dustier than a shelf-full of Liberace records, so our first task was to sweep out all twenty-five thousand square feet and hose the entire floor down. Having done that, we started moving fur- niture down. This consisted of spare furnishings from the bedrooms of the seven or eight teens in the apartment building, and provided a motif of random seventies kitsch; one can see the same school of design nowadays in a thrift store. Plaid abutted naugahyde, and brass struggled mightily with wood-printed pressboard. We brought down Danny Porteous's Marantz stereo, Mike Walden's "bitchen" album collection, and Tammy Walden's blacklights and posters. The liquor arrived about six P.M. with Todd Porteous and my sister. Having no idea how many were go- ing to show up, they'd filled up a Peykan taxi with the works, so the ten or so of us present set about unloading the taxi bucket-brigade style. They had gotten cases of assorted beers -- Schlitz, Tuborg, Heineken, Budweiser -- and a crate filled with bot- tles of liquor: rum, brandy, several different whisk- eys, and peppermint schnapps. It was around then that the party-goers started drifting in by twos and threes. After all that work, I was filthy, and so I repaired to Greg’s apartment and cleaned up for the shindig. I found a vastly different party upon returning down- stairs. With the sun no longer filtering down the long driveway, the lighting was candles and Coleman lan- terns punctuated by strobe. One corner of the garage was studded with teenage couples grooving to overly loud disco. We shouldn't have bothered sweeping the floor; we could’ve just cranked the tunes and let the bellbottoms do the work. I found the bar that had been set up in my absence, and cracked a tall can of Schlitz. It's pointless to try and recount the party blow-by- blow; either you were there or you weren't. I re- member very little of my first drunk: I remember making out with Courtney Taylor, finally, and how good her lips felt on mine, and how I worried if my hand was too far up her thigh, or not far enough. Her lips felt good, her hips magical. I remember Danny Porteous and some guy named Ricky getting into a fight over the latter's spilling a beer on Danny's stereo. I remember hearing Black Sabbath for the first time. I'm told I drank a two of cans of beer and had a rum-and-coke, and that I was cool until I tried to give a trick-riding demonstration on my bike, which ended up with me power-sliding into one of the concrete support posts. Judging from the scrapes and scratches on my bike, it was one hell of a wipeout. Oh, and I remember my sister getting too drunk and throwing up all over the floor. Mostly I remember the worst headache I'd ever had, come the next morning. I felt like my head was clamp- ed in a vise and being heated. I know I wasn't alone in that feeling, either; judging from the moans and groans emanating from the twenty or so victims near- by, they shared my sensation of having a skull under construction. My mouth was dry and my limbs weak as I staggered upstairs in search of water. The kids due to camp out at Seven Pools had left early, but I was in the throes of my first -- but not last -- hang- over, and so I didn’t get to see my sis off. Work came hard, but it did distract me, and so I threw myself into the cleanup with what gusto I could muster. That morning I learned that hangovers should be avoid- ed; but if one was incurred, it was best to pound through it. (Perhaps this is where the phrase “sweat it out” arose?) At any rate, Greg and Cory and I spent the morning straightening up the garage, and reconstruct- ing the goings-on of our first real party. We had finish- ed both tasks by noontime, and after lunch, I left for home. And as I rode home I realized that I had an en- tire weekend to myself, without my sister to bug me, to remember Courtney on my lap and Wild Cherry in my ears; and my headache lifted and the warm May sun was my friend once more. |
| Posted by Thumpalumpacus - 09-19-2021, 01:06 PM |
|
27. Overview I divide our life in Iran into two periods: that before October of ‘77, and that after May of ‘78. When we first arrived in Iran, I was a lad, a boy, and that hadn’t much changed through the ensuing two-and-a- half years, seemingly (of course, looking back, I can see some events that started me on the road to adolescence well before I was aware of it as a destination). It was the general experience of living overseas which differentiated us and thus began pre- maturely the end of our childhoods. Living in Iran got me started thinking about things in an adult manner -- and what is adoles- cence but the inner struggle of adult thoughts and childish desires? And upon our return to Texas, being assigned the role of outsider, I realized at once why this was happening; and this awareness only increased my rate of maturation. And, incidentally, it made me homesick again, for Iran. That year in El Paso was a strange year indeed. When we arrived back in town, all the old places seemed unchanged, even though we had settled into a new neighborhood. Trans-Mountain Road still wound its way up past Franklin Mountain. The air was still that desiccated stuff that sucked all the moisture out of your lungs as you drew it in, and robbed your mouth of comfort on its way out. Everything was coated with the omnipresent dust from the surrounding desert. I was eleven years old when we returned to Texas that November, but I no longer thought like your average eleven-year-old American boy. I mean, I built models and played football and looked for- ward to Christmas excitedly; but I also smoked cigarettes, cussed like a sailor, and was used to going after things on my own. I wasn’t afraid to be my own charge, and I didn’t much care what any of the kids in my new school thought of me. (This last fact definitely threw them for a loop; they weren’t used to independence, and certainly not independent thought, so here was another reason to dislike me, for many of them. In this way I received a healthy foretaste of adolescence. I had once again to earn my reputation in a new school, but I no longer cared to do so). The Small World Theory ensured that I did know one kid from my early days in the area -- Danny Rodriguez was his name -- but we had grown a bit apart by now and he hung out with a kid named Michael, who distinctly did not like me, and so al- though Danny and I still got along, we didn’t run like we used to -- he was swayed, perhaps, by Michael’s attitude. I didn’t waste much time worrying about it anyway. I found a gal, LaNell, who horrified my dad with the fact she was latina. She was just tomboy enough to be fun and just feminine enough to be deliriously attractive. She was my first puppy love, maybe; I had been fond of Christie Hudspeth, too, back in Teheran. LaNell and I’d hang out at the A&W around the corner from both Bonham Elementary School and our new apartment, smoking cigarettes and quaffing root beer. Or we’d dance in the gym at lunchtime -- despite my taste for rock-n-roll, I learned the Hustle just to make her happy -- and so I didn’t much care whether or not any of the kids took to me or not. And when Michael Vidal and I scrapped, and I held my own, he decided I was a tough nut to crack anyway, and thus left me alone. It wasn’t long after that that the Porteii too returned from Iran temporarily, and then the fun really began. Greg and I were two years apart, so he went to a dif- ferent school, but we were otherwise inseparable. We tore up Cielo Vista Mall and learned the art of “borrowing” from the nearby FedMart, where I stocked up on models to build and he got a new suite of base- ball gear. By the time the New Year rolled around, we were well ensconced back in El Paso, and the year ahead burgeoned with promise. Family life improved as well. Because of his school, Dad was at White Sands Missile Range every Saturday night live-firing, and so Mom and Sue and I got a quick tradition started: take-out dinner from the local Pancho’s Mexican Buffet. If you’ve never had Pancho’s Mexican Buffet, you haven’t lived. There’s absolutely nothing Mexican about Pancho’s food, except the nomenclature, and perhaps the vague seasoning of dishes largely consisting of polysyllabic additives that have been found to cause cancer in laboratory animals; but man, is it some addictive stuff. (Perhaps I should write: “therefore, it is some addictive stuff”?) Two tacos and two chile rellenos, washed down with root beer from A&W -- my Saturday night dish. We’d eat Pancho’s and watch “Sha Na Na” and then Susan would spend twenty minutes trying to sneak out for a cigarette while I cal- led LaNell or Greg. I don’t think Dad missed us that much on those Pancho’s Saturday nights. Thus we passed the spring. It was May of that year when we returned to Iran for our last tenure. Man, was it a long flight; our itinerary read: Dallas to New York to Teheran. The last leg, aboard Pan Am’s Atlantic Clipper, saw us spend nineteen hours in the air, the longest stretch I’ve ever spent at six miles’ altitude. The highlight of the flight came right at the beginning, too: a lovely bird’s-eye view of Manhattan (which was the first, and only, time I saw the brand-new, and ill-fated, World Trade Center). I still don’t know what it was about our time in El Paso that urged upon me increasing maturity, other than simple biology; the problem with that explan- ation is that it is, for my satisfaction, incomplete. My taste in music was still rather juvenile, but I was also exposed to adult music around this time: Rod Stewart (old Rod Stewart, featuring the acous- tic twelve-string and boozy vocals), Led Zeppelin, and AC/DC -- but KISS remained my favorite band. “Saturday Night Live” was my favorite TV show now, and it really was because of the satire -- sopho- moric humor had already started annoying me, a personal leaning which leaves me seriously out-of- step with these Jim Carrey-loving cohorts nowadays. That notwithstanding, I still rose early on Saturdays to catch all ninety minutes of the “Bugs Bunny / Roadrunner Show”. All of this came about why? I think it has something to do with the fact that for the first time in my life I was actually conscious of being different from everyone else around me. When we returned, my peers in El Paso generally speaking had no idea where Iran was. I don’t think they much cared, either. They were very concerned with fashion and cliques and who had a crush on whom. (In this also was a foreshadowing of adolescence, no?)They’d typically not been out of El Paso. For them, the world ended at the county line. For me, that was where the world began. Let’s face it, El Paso was not exactly the center of the Universe, a fact which was and is painfully obvious at first glance, even to eleven-year-old eyes. The city has no great museums, no famous orchestras or jazz clubs or gardens. Hell, it didn’t even have a decent amusement park -- we had to drive six hundred miles to go to Six Flags over Texas. By contrast, Teheran was a huge city, as large in population as Dallas/Fort Worth, El Paso, and Houston combined, and if it too lacked a decent theme park or jazz club, it had something more valuable -- free- dom. See, when we were in America, everyone spoke English. Well, most did, at any rate. And that was a limitation on us kids; we couldn’t do anything we damned well pleased when not with the parents, for fear of someone recognizing us and telling us off. So while we had our little scrapes and adventures in Texas, these were furtive gestures born usually out of a desire to get out of a pickle. By contrast, our little scrapes and adventures in Teheran were usually brought about by a desire to get into a pickle. We didn’t fear being ratted off by locals there, and the American parents were easy enough to avoid. In a way, Teheran was one big amusement park. Too, I know that the ride down the Brazos River put some hair on my chest as well; riding that canoe like a wild mare, with no room for error, to rescue Coon before the current got him was a formative experience, for it took all the wild times I’d had as an Expat and distilled them, filtering that love of adventure over the char- coal of deadly purpose. No longer were the stakes a plank for the fort, or getting away so as to avoid restriction. If we screwed up, some- one could die. And it wasn’t a friend I was com- ing through for, not an Expat, not even my cou- sin; it was my dad who relied on me, and that evening when he told me that he was proud of me marked another leg on my march to man- hood, and I in a small way felt less childish and more like him. But I think what really changed after our stay in El Paso was what we as kids saw -- and didn’t see. Growing up overseas, I had become accustomed to seeing police or paramilitary troops with sub- machine guns here and there. They weren’t per- vasive, but they could be seen at places like the Pahlevi Monument (a sort of post-modern, marble- white Arc de Triumph) or the airport. Additionally, the SAVAK -- the secret police -- cast a shadow even on the awareness of a eleven-year-old boy, once I realized that secret police weren’t a part of American society, once I realized that they were secret for dread reasons. I’d heard tell of how inmates were beaten with hoses in their prisons, and how cattle-prods were used to elicit infor- mation from witnesses (and my Dad was insis- tently silent on his three days spent in their hos- pitality, so I knew there was something bad behind their bars), and there was Jerry’s tale, too, about that day at his dad’s office, but it wasn’t until I started learning civics in an American school that it really struck me that it wasn’t a normal society which sanctioned this sort of thing. Police weren’t secret in America, and they didn’t carry machine guns. So when in May of ‘78, when we returned to Teheran through Merhabad International Airport and I once again saw the gendarmes with their Uzis slung low, it jarred me, and I furtively studied them, in their sharply pressed green uniforms and cavalry boots, and leather belts as shiny as the barrels of their guns. They certainly walked upright, arrogantly almost, and they wore their hats indoors, which, at the time, I took to be a sign of their being uncouth. (I’ve since learned that it is military tradition that all men under arms retain their headgear even indoors. That doesn’t, however, change the admittedly incorrect impres- sion I had garnered at the time). What we’d seen -- and hadn’t seen -- changed the way we thought, you see. And throughout that summer of our return, we heard quiet rumblings of troubles from across the country, tales which were told in the capital city to explain the movement of brigades and battalions in the middle of the night, tales which made us wor- ry adult worries. Of course, these tales were told behind closed doors, in a building you were sure of, such as your home or that of a friend. And of course, we kids had to practice studious, childish eavesdropping in order to learn anything adult. Thus it was that I learned that the flatbed trailers carrying those tanks was bound for Mashad, where conservative Muslims had been fomenting unrest. Thus it was that I learned that that squadron of Cobra helicopter gunships I’d seen flying southwest were headed to Abadan, where a theater had been torched by government men -- to believe the rumors -- while fully packed, killing over four hundred people, and inciting some fierce rioting. Thus it was that the first distant rumblings of rebellion leaked into our world, like a distant prairie thunderstorm you can hear, knowing full well that it’s headed your way; you can feel the air grow thick on your cheeks, and sooner or later, you can see the tops of the stratocumulus clouds cresting the horizon, and then a freshening breeze carries to your nose the faintest whiff of ozone. You start putting away the loose stuff laying nearby, stuff that you know is going to start flying around once that freshening breeze turns into violent gusts carrying hailstones the size of golf balls that will strip the trees of leaves and occasionally break bones; and Heaven help you if you were in the open, far from shelter, when the lightning started crashing and you were the tallest thing around. You were the target. Heaven help you. That was what that summer felt like to us. The air was pregnant with foreboding, and one needn’t be a prairie native to feel it. It was right outside the window, in the form of a soldier carrying an M-16 or an Imperial Guard carrying an Uzi. In the main bazaar on the south side of town, near school, you could occasionally see rabble-rousers speaking to peaceful gatherings, watched intently by scores of police. Armored vehicles, mainly M-113s but with a sampling of M-48 and M-60 tanks, and M-8 Greyhound armored cars, could occasionally be seen, usually in convoy, but sometimes posted at an important intersection. Through all this tension, we danced a charmed dance. We had no worries for our personal safety at the hands of the security forces gathering in the city, and were as yet blissfully unaware of the depth of hatred the dissidents felt towards us Westerners, so we careened gleefully from one day to the next. While my Halo, though tarnished, remained in place, my parents lengthened my leash, and my allowance had grown commensurately, and so my friends and I could afford to leave the beaten path of organized activity for our own trail, which, not surprisingly, was less wholesome and more exciting. This was especially true with Cory, given that a hundred rials kept gas in his moped for a week; and we were perfect foils for each other. He supplied the dash and I brought brains to the table. We hadn’t arrived at the regimen of being home by 5:00 p.m. lest we fall victim to kidnappers or over- zealous soldiers enforcing a curfew; but the sur- rounding pressure was enforcing a maturity on us of which we were at the time unaware, rather like the pressure of a deep-sea environment that forces the fish therein to maintain an internal body pressure that is explosive at the surface of the ocean. We were steeled to our exacting environment, and, removed from such, we faced trouble much as the coelacanth does at surface pressures. It is plain upon hindsight. We had to think in terms of external controls, and project consequences, and what is that but the product of an adult mind? Thus it was, in the maelstrom of revolution, that my youth, like a fish hauled up from the depths, exploded. . 1978 was indeed a pivotal year in my life. |
| Posted by Thumpalumpacus - 09-12-2021, 04:16 PM |
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26. Possum Kingdom The dam stood to our right, huge, grey, imposing, slotted cleanly into its cleft, and where it joined the rock one could see no seam, as if its edges ran clean into the bones of the abutting hills. The May sun had yet to reach the top of the sky or the bottom of our notch; the day was still young. And as it grew older, it would be getting hot. We'd just finished with five days of record rainfall, as if my home state were seeing us back to Iran with a deluge. Once the day did heat up, it would be mighty humid, too. The four of us got busy unloading canoes from the trailer-rack, and fetching supplies from the bed of the truck which brought us up here. The old and abused Ford F-100, which might once have been dark green, was now the color of the Brazos River we were getting ready to canoe, a dull clear olive with tan foam scudding upon the eddies. "Beautiful day for it," said the driver who'd brought us out twenty-four miles from the rental shack. "And the river's high, too. Y'all picked a good day for a trip." My cousin Coon -- James Norris was his given name, "Coon" was the cross he had to bear -- eyeballed the river cautiously. "I'd rather have rafts, what with the water this high. It's bound to get quick if'n the river narrows." "And that it certainly does, young man," answered the driver cheerfully as he coiled up a nylon line, "about ten miles downstream." "Palo Pinto Canyon, ain't it?" my dad asked. "That'd be the one, yes sir. You do want to watch out around there. Even in normal stage it's got some funny currents in it." He slammed the tailgate home on the old Ford, saw that it didn't catch, and slammed it again. "And because that's mainly overhang, when the river floods, it gets skinny, and fast, too." "You been there, Johnny?" my uncle asked. "No," Dad answered, "I just remember seeing an old Corps of Engineers map with that marked a little down- stream from the dam," and he jerked a thumb over his shoulder at Possum Kingdom Dam, which managed to be gloomy even in the broadening morning. "Ain't nothin' to sweat," said the driver, "so long as you're well away from the banks. Some funny shore current there, and as like as not to drag you onto some rocks." I helped Dad launch our canoe, and lashed it to a tree-trunk with a bowline-and-loop. "Y'all check your emergency kits?" the driver asked. "It's there," said my Uncle Rip with a grin. I checked the one in our boat discreetly, standing knee-deep in the bracing water. It was there, the emergency pack, and probably had been there since Christ rode a mule through Jerusalem, to tell by the looks of it -- the latches were rusted pretty well shut, and the stenciled Red Cross had faded to a sickly pink. The high-impact plastic had apparently been tested by impacts and found wanting, cracked at the corners, and a long gouge across its front. I didn't want to inventory its contents. "We'd best not need it," said Dad. "We miss that plane Tuesday and I pay our way back to Iran." "Well, don't y'all pay any mind to it, I'll be seeing you back at the shack this afternoon," assured the driver as Dad slipped him a tip. "Remember, don't stand in your boat, and stay the hell out of the trees." With that, he turned over that old 302, which sputtered twice before catching with a roar and plenty of blue smoke. The head gasket was going bad. He pulled out onto the old Farm-Market route, I think it was FM 16, with the empty trailer behind the truck clattering in rhythm, and then all we could hear was the muted roar of thousands of gallons of water crashing through the spillways, and into the Brazos River. Dad looked at Uncle Rip. "You ready?" "Mmhmm, I reckon so." "Well, let's didimou, then." So I clambered into our boat, sitting on the middle spar, and busied myself with lashing down our cooler as Dad followed me in. "Sit still, damn it," he mumb- led and he sat down, dry despite my jittering the ca- noe, and he tugged the loop of my bowline, pulling the rope aboard. The line slicing through the water reminded me that with a flood this high and a day this pretty, there were bound to be plenty of water moccasins out for a swim, and plenty of rattlers try- ing to stay day, and that we needed to be careful ashore or afloat. I dug my oar deep into the muddy bank so as to give us a good shove, and then the cur- rent grabbed us and we were off. It was a beautiful spring day, with a riotous bloom of wildflowers scent- ing up the air, which was warm and thick in the way that only North Texas after five wet days can get to be. Somewhere ahead of us, a junebug started a long, steady buzznote. Here, some forty miles northwest of Weatherford, Texas, the Brazos River cut through some rough country, rocky hills some six or eight hundred foot high, and while the river was broad and slow when we'd start- ed, it was a deceptive calm. It was broad and slow be- cause seven open floodgates on the dam had raised the river's level fifteen or so foot, and the wider river ran slower -- now through copses of black and white oak, cypress , and some elm which marched up the hillsides. Further in towards the middle of the river, little islands of foliage broke the smooth flow of the water like leafy snorkels. They were the tops of inundated trees. I looked nervously back at Possum Kingdom Dam and, as I watched, one of the two remaining floodgates opened u, releasing water into another sluice with a deep rumble. Another floodgate was being opened. Out in the middle of the river, the current picked up, and so I laid my oar across my lap and spread out my lifejacket underneath me. The spar that was my seat was hard, and I didn't much care for the rope holding the cooler in place trying to crawl up my ass, either. The lifejacket eased my backside, and so I sat and watched the hillsides sheathed in emerald velour slide past at a steady six miles per hour or so. "I wished I'd remembered my rod," hollered Coon as their boat pulled ahead of us. "I done seen a couple of good largemouth already." "Yeah, or that .410," I called back, motioning to a flock of turkeys roosting in a black oak near ashore. My fa- vorite bird-gun was back in Pittsburg in Uncle Rip's cabinet, four hours away. Overhead, a couple of buzzards wheeled, dark slashes against the blue. Not enough for a carcass. They were just picking up some height for their search. Didn't see any moccasins -- maybe the water was too cool yet. I pulled my eyes back to the river at a word from my dad, and resumed scanning for the eddys which might mark an inundated tree. We didn't want to get askew the current in a canoe, because we came to boat, not swim. We made good time and had covered about a quarter of our course when we found a fine sandspit on the inside of an oxbow. We stopped there for lunch, pul- ling our boats up onto the sand. The far side of the river, at this point about a hundred yards across, was an escarpment in which erosion had exposed tree roots, which hung out the side of the cliff. The face was dotted by weeds and bushes, and a small oak tree scraping out what had to be a miser- able time of it. I ate my sandwich, silent. A fat cat- fish was nibbling at the chicken-bones Uncle Rip had thrown into a shallow, and we wished for tack- le once more. "You think that's big, you ain't seen a thing," Rip said around a mouthful of potato salad. "The ones they bring up from 'hind the dam got to be ten foot or so." "Now, don't go pullin' their legs, Rip." "I ain't, I ain't," he chuckled with his wicked grin. "Why, up at Lake o' the Pines, Bert pulled one up 'bout as big as one of them canoes. Said he had to tow it in behind his bass-boat, and it almost won." Dad swigged the last of his beer. "Yeah, Bert's never told fishin' stories," and they both let loose that loud Jessup laugh. We made ready to leave, and I noticed the clouds getting darker and lower on the northern horizon, big pregnant blue things, and it looked like we were going to get wet even if we stayed in the boats. We shoved off. The river was running quicker, and the gate I'd seen opened had made its impression -- the high-water marks on the tree-trunks were now a few inches over the lichen and moss which had been dry when we landed. Treetops which had broached the sur- face when we pulled in were now only whitecaps in the quickening current. They could still upset our boats, so we had to work slow and hard, working between the eddys and whitecaps. The view be- fore us was amazing. As we rounded the switch- back of the oxbow, an enormous rock wall, per- haps seven hundred foot high, rose on the south bank, rock veined grey and white and rusty pink. Under that massif, the river, now, perhaps two hundred yards wide, dwindled into seemingly nothing. "Damn it, Jim, swing her over," barked my dad. Uncle Rip and Coon were hung on a treetop and spinning to our left, so we picked our way cross- current, tacking into it to get upstream, and then an eddy caught us and we swept past them. We almost collided, and Dad took the opportunity to give them a shove free with his oar before we pas- sed them and pitched down into a sink and then we were in it. Our speed had about doubled and in front of us were many treetops and eddys scat- tered to Hell and back. "Right, Jim, to the right!" Dad hollered, and I dug my oar in deep to the left, dug in with my oar to the handhold, shipping wa- ter, to get our nose around to the right so we could get a slower current. Then we were there, and as we slowly entered a low tunnel of elm and oak boughs, I turned around and saw that both Dad and I were laughing. My uncle and cousin were a ways back, upright, and having a helluva time angling for our current. As we passed through the trees, the current pick- ed up, but the ride was smoother because here the trees weren't swamped. All we had to do was avoid the trunks. "We got a turn coming up, Dad, to the left," I called, digging in to the right again. I could feel Dad dragging his oar, bring us smoothly into the turn as we sped up and then we saw it, right in our path and it was too late to do a goddamned thing about it: an old white oak covered in Span- ish moss. Dad was hollering to get the nose around, dig in, goddamnit, get that nose around, and the nose came around but too slow and I dug in shoveling water back and right as I saw that bastard tree coming closer and then our keel slid broadside right up that goddamned trunk and my world turned airless and wet and green as I grabbed for a spar flashing by overhead and missed and then he was pulling my hair fuck all, but that hurts but it woke me up out of my panic and it kept us together so I never said anything later about it. I caught a handhold on our capsized hull and came up for air as we exited that tree-tunnel and re- entered the main current. Dad released his grip. "You okay, boy?" "I'm fine, you?" "I lost a boot and my smokes. We still have the cooler?" "I don't know, Dad, I can't tell. But you lost your hat too. I still got my oar." "Good." He thought for a moment. "Get up on this boat, and start paddling. I'll swim in the back and steer." We were now back in the mainstream, side- ways and adrift. I threw a leg up, got beaten back, tried again and failed, and then hooked it the third time. It was like mounting a skit- tish mare bareback, us bobbing in the current and all. Dad started steering us to tack into the current, and I looked back just in time to see Rip and Coon run into that same bastard tree, but I couldn't watch much, just enough to see them get turned over like a dicecup. Coon yelled. The we sloughed into an eddy and my only thought was to stay up on the hull and let's get onto some goddamned ground already. We had to get out of the river before that beautiful grey and white and rusty pink cliff got hold of us. Stroke -- grip the legs tighter -- are they okay? -- deeper, dig deeper -- stroke -- "They lose it?" Dad shouted. "Uh huh." I looked around again, and re- doubled my paddling as Dad swung us into the current a little so we could tack upstream. I alternated my strokes side-to-side, and we held our position. I looked back again as my uncle hauled himself up laying on their hull. Coon I couldn't see, but I could hear him cus- sin' back towards the Tree and that told me he had air. "Knock that cussin' off, boy!" shouted my uncle as he caught a trunk and stopped him- self. "This piece-of-shit tree ain't had done with me yet, Dad," Coon shouted back. "Get up out of the water and stay put, and knock the swearin' off too!" My dad and I couldn't make any headway upstream. "Let's get across this jube, boy. Get over to that sandbar and set this thing right there." He turned and yelled at my uncle. "We're gonna land and walk upstream, we'll come down and get you. Stay put!" "When you come back down," Rip shouted back, "fetch up Coon first. I'm okay here." But as we approached the north bank, a shore- current pushed us back out again. The sheer face of Palo Pinto Canyon's south side looked as big as the sky now, looming half-a-mile downstream; the current was fast and rough and we didn't have much time. I tried not to think of those rocks as my back muscles ached with effort, but two more tries failed, the rapids were damned close, and my strength was waning. "Come on, boy, now we do it. I know you can, we're almost there. That's it. Let's get it. Okay, bring 'er around, son, there you go." Dad's words were grunted through his straining. And then we were very near a pool that was isolated from the shore current, maybe a foot or two deep, so I jumped for the sand bar and got it. Mud ran into my boots, but they were still laced and so they stayed on through the suction that helped anchor me for pulling the boat in. We got the boat up and over, and then I crawled on all fours to the nearest dry sand and fell down, exhausted. "You okay?" "Yeah, I just need to catch my wind." "Take some time, we can't screw this up again." He turned to look at the river. "Coon's still treed and now Rip's cussin' too," he smiled. "You sure you're all right?" "I'm fine, just tired is all." "Three more minutes, and then we got to hump this sonofabitch upstream a ways." I got up and went to the boat, which rested on its side in the sand. The cooler was still lashed in, and so I got a couple of beers out and handed Dad one. He eyed me closely as I popped the other one and took a long, ugly-tasting drink. "Go easy with that, we still gotta get them over," he said. I took another drink, not as long, and set it down. "You ready?" "Yessir." "Let's didimou, then," he said. It took about twenty minutes to get the boat upstream to a good launching point, but the work was easier than fighting a current with it upside-down. We let the current carry us across. The time we picked our way through the shore currents in that tunnel and so didn't get the Tree again. We found Coon easily enough. He'd lost his oar and was deadweight, but he still had his backpack, so when we got to his dad (who'd kept his oar) in their boat, he could steer by dragging that, which made theirs a working boat. We crossed the river again and drew up on the same landing. The crossing was much easir with the hull upright. We had another beer, but the remaining sand- wiches were soaked. After resting a spell. we set off again. The last half of the trip was anticlimactic. Palo Pinto Canyon itself proved to be a mostly un- eventful passage. Although the river's level continued to rise, once past the canyon the rise slowed the current and, while making for a safer back nine, increased our work. Being shy two oars, we kept near the shore, and end- ed up carrying our boats at a couple of spots where the alternative was clearly unfeasible. We didn't dare run the mainstream again in our state. We arrived at the rental shack around six in the evening. We had to shoot another rapid and un- der a bridge to get to the landing, but after the ride we'd had that afternoon, I felt like I could sail a brick through a typhoon. We were sunburnt to Hell and gone and I'd felt like some turned me upside-down and poured me out. We climbed out of the boats and walked into the shack. Our driver looked up, and then down at our feet, and then up, slowly. "About five months ago I saw a thee-car wreck on I-30," he said as we paid up our fees for losing their oars and whatnot. "Y'all look like them poor SoBs I pulled outta them wrecks." "Well, amigo," said my Dad quietly, "You might could say we've been rode hard and put up wet." We all laughed, and it was a good, tired, honest laugh. It was short, too. The drive back to Grandma Vaughan's home in Grand Prairie was mostly quiet because we were beat and wanted nothing more than a bite to eat and a soft bed, but at one point, as Hoyt Axton was singing in the background about boney fin- gers, my dad up and out of the blue looked at me and said quietly, "Jim?" "Yeah, Dad?" "I'm proud of the way, the way you handled your- self today." I didn't know what to say. "Well, thanks, Daddy," I said finally, "I was just doing what anyone else would do." "No son, I mean it," he said. Not just anyone would do that, what we did, what you did, today." "I guess you're right," I said after a spell. "It takes a Jessup to do a damnfool thing like canoe a flooded river." He laughed. "Ain't that the truth?" |
| Posted by Thumpalumpacus - 09-05-2021, 09:34 PM |
(09-05-2021, 09:19 PM)SYZ Wrote: Uncle Rip sounds like a real turd, and not a true bushman at all. He wasn't a bushman. He was a rancher on retirement (about 25 head of cattle) who rounded out his income from trapping animals and selling their pelts. He was generally a good man, but like all of us, a little complex. |
| Posted by SYZ - 09-05-2021, 09:19 PM |
Uncle Rip sounds like a real turd, and not a true bushman at all.  BTW, small typo... "Fokker F-27 twin-enigned turboprop". An aside; I flew in F-27Fs in outback Western Australia as a FIFO in the late 1970s and early80s. The 'F' was modified a little for the Aussie fleet. |
| Posted by Thumpalumpacus - 09-05-2021, 12:58 PM |
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***** Texas ***** 24. An Icy Day "You ready, boy?" "Yessir." "Well, let's git." It was a cold day, and about four inches of snow lay on the ground, and although he hadn't said anything, I could tell by his limp that my Uncle Rip's gunshot knee was singing pain as we clambered into his truck to go clear his traps. It took two tries before the engine caught on his Dodge, and another two minutes or so before the heater started pump- ing semi-warm air into the cab. By that time we were on the rutted track leading up past his corral and into his pasture land, headed to the pine and maple thickets beyond his cattle pond. Fat black clouds hung low. We'd flown back to Camp County for the holi- days, to visit with my dad's folk for our first Christmas Stateside in four years. The flight itself was terrifying by any standards. Given that we'd flown well over fifty thousand miles in the last three years, we'd never experienced anything like this. The flight into DFW from El Paso was a milk run, no problem at all; but when we left DFW two days later, one Hell of an icestorm was brewing over the plains and, as we were flying into Longview, Texas, population twenty-two thousand and change, we were on what Dad called a "bucket of bolts", a Fokker F-27 twin-enigned turboprop. A distres- singly small plane. By the time we reached the airfield at Longview the plane was quite literally bouncing forty or fifty feet as it entered and left the updrafts of a Texas storm. Interstate Thirty lurched sickeningly below us for the last twenty minutes of flight, and never was I so grateful to land in one piece, even with a full "discomfort bag". That same storm was now lingering over us, and had laid snow and ice all over Hell's half- acre, so that Uncle Rip on this Christmas Eve-eve had to weigh down his truck with a half-cord of wood in the bed so as to main- tain traction as we went to check his traps. Uncle Rip was not your standard-issue Jessup. We're normally built tall and rangy, with no extra baggage; but my uncle was short, at five-eight, and barrel-chested, and working on a “Dunlop” -- “my belly done lopped over my belt,” he’d say with a sharp grin. Unlike the other Jessup boys, he was a teetotaler and devoutly religious, and where my dad and my other uncles (two, not counting Rip) were quiet, he was loud, almost boisterous, with a wicked laugh that told you your leg was being pulled very hard. He'd worked many years at the steel plant in Lone Star, Texas, as a security guard, until one night a couple of drunken Hell-raisers put a bullet through the door of his Chevy pickup and his knee, in that order; so he took a medi- cal retirement, bought a Dodge pickup, and continued managing his small cattle-ranch, maintaining a herd of twenty or so head. On top of that, he trapped his sixty-five acres of East Texas forest for, as he called it, "fun money". On this particular day, the storm had kept all the critters in their dens, sensibly, and so his traps were by and large empty. And while I'm not now nor have I ever been privy to Uncle Rip's finances, looking back, I figure he must've been about broke, it being Christmas and having my two cousins to make happy. At the time, I only knew he was terribly irate at the empty traps, until we pulled up to one which had an animal in it. "We got one, boy," he announced, and threw the Dodge into neutral as we clam- bered out, but his enthusiasm turned sour as we approached the trap, lain near the creek at the edge of his wood, as he saw that he had an opossum caught. It was still alive, and started at our arrival, but to my surprise, my uncle didn't ask for his rifle off'n the window-rack but rather his toolbox out of the bed. "You don't want the gun?" "Naw, boy, bullets cost money." "But you'd shot that 'coon back a couple of summers when we were on vacation, I remember you bringing it back." "Coonskins bring in more money than 'possums." His tone was irritated, so I stop- ped talking and fetched his toolbox. He took out a clawhammer and went over to the animal, which, exhausted by its exertions was lying relatively still and, taking it by the neck, Uncle Rip laid a hammerblow at the base of its skull. I winced involuntarily at the impact, and then got his Bowie knife for him. He flipped the beast over -- it was as still as stone -- but when my uncle made his first dressing-cut, from the throat to the belly, the 'possum jumped and started scratching. "God damn it!" my uncle hollered, and this floored me, for he was a religious man and not given to blasphemy. He seized the ani- mal by the neck, flipped it over, grabbed the hammer, and landed a couple of more blows at the base of its skull. I could hear the bones crunching, sounding like nothing more than the snow which crunched under- foot as we stepped; but then I saw the snow around its head turning red and realized that it was bleeding out of every hole in its head. I guess I was rather flustered, for, before I turned back to the truck, I snapped at my Uncle Rip, "Just shoot the damned thing, okay?" I got the .22 off'n the window-rack. "Here, I'll do it m'self." "Don't talk to me like that, boy," he told me. "I'll take you over my knee right here. I ain't wasting a bullet on this skin. You go ahead and put that iron back where you got it." "How much is a bullet?" I asked. "Eleven cents." I was going to give him the money, but rea- lized that my money was in my backpack by his fireplace. By this time, Uncle Rip had landed a few more blows, and the animal was quiescent as he skinned it, deftly lining the hide down the inside of its arms and legs before cutting a collar at the neck. He quickly peeled off the fur as I stared on, my heart smarting with empathy for the critter but too afraid to voice this feeling. I busied myself with resetting the steel jaws of the trap -- how’s that for not thinking? -- and policing up the other tools that had found their way out of the toolbox as he'd hunted up his clawhammer, and then I stood still. The 'possum, bleeding out of its ears, eyes, nose, and mouth, bereft of any protection against the elements, nakeder than the day it was born, was crawling through the snow towards the scent of the water in the creek, skinless, dying. It took everything I had to keep from crying, but goddamnit, I was not going to cry in front of my uncle. My heart broke at the sight of this piteous creature, and then anger rose inside me, hot anger, and I took the hammer back out of the toolbox and, walking quickly over to it, smote it twice square in the head, fearfully hard. On the second blow, the skull collapsed completely, and one eyeball popped out of its socket. I stood silently, staring at the now-lifeless corpse in front of me, still resolved not to cry, not to show my uncle that I had a soft heart, and then I felt his hand on my shoulder. "Good work, son," he said. "That was the right thing to do." "Nossir," I corrected him for the one and only time in my life, "the right thing to do was to shoot it before it suffered." My uncle stood back and looked at me long and hard for a moment, and then, picking up his skin said very quietly, "Let's go." That day something changed between my uncle and I, and we were never the same again. Where before it was he and not my Dad who actually taught me how to shoot, and taught me how to drive his stick-shift tractor, and taught me how to fish, after- wards he could barely be bothered to talk to me. He had always seemed so jolly, but that seemed to wane when he'd look at me silently. I was no longer looking at him through eyes that idolized him. I'd seen a brutal side to this man I loved, and not only did it repel me, it changed the way I looked at him, for I'd lost a hero. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t lost on him. |
| Posted by SYZ - 08-29-2021, 03:03 PM |
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A very poignant part of your story mate. Must've been good... it brought a lump to even my cynical old throat. |
| Posted by Thumpalumpacus - 08-29-2021, 01:54 PM |
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23. The Cat It was the first cool, crisp morning of autumn. It wasn’t so cold that your breath steam- ed, but the seasons had snapped, from a summer that lasted well into October just like they did back home, to brisk mornings with yellow leaves. I’ve always felt a secret joy in the onset of autumn, my favorite sea- son. The days were warm enough to permit shirtsleeves and ice cream and the outdoor swimming pool at the Community Recrea- tion Center, but the nights were cool enough to be comfortable in repose and the mosqui- toes were fewer as well. The air smells clean- er and it’s not so cold that one must sweat up a jacket. It was therefore a shiver of delight that pas- sed through me that morning as I awaited my school bus at the intersection of Zafar and Old Shemiran on one of our last days in-country before heading home. The crisp wind blowing in off the mountains signaled the change of seasons, biting at my cheeks, making me dig deeply in search of the bot- toms of my pockets. My friends Pat and Eric were busy clowning, but I was listening to bird- song and enjoying the unusually clean air and absorbing the neighborhood around me: the Persian music drifting from a blaster hung on a cigarette-vendor’s cart; the rushing traffic on Zafar; the cries of vendors selling their wares. I ponied up the twenty rials for a copy of the Kayhan’s morning edition; the Yankees were headed for the World Series for the first time in years, and, having finally caught the baseball bug, I had to get the box scores. I couldn’t really say what it was that made me look up from the paper -- it sure wasn’t the bus, which was late -- but I looked up and saw a bony little orange cat worrying some trash in the jube for breakfast. The poor thing was unkempt and, although I’m not a cat kind of guy -- I prefer, and always have preferred, dogs -- this cat just pulled a string inside me, so I dug out some money and ran quickly into the cornershop and bought a can of sardines, peeled off the lid, and, setting them down, watched the cat devour them. He looked at me longingly with rheumy eyes, wanting for more; but I hadn’t much more money on me and had to save it for lunch and the new E.L.O. tape, so I patted its bony back, ruffling its mangy fur. “Sorry, pal. You’re on your own now.” The cat looked at me levelly. There was a yellowish, crusty stuff in the corner of its eyes, and a freshly healing cut on one of its cheeks. The tip of its tail flicked expectantly. “I mean it, man. I’m tapped out.” It looked at me a moment longer, and then, realizing that I wasn’t lying, it started off, getting a free back- rub against my leg as it did so. I went back to my sports page. Bucky Dent had gone two-for-four, with a single and a -- A screech of brakes drew my attention, and I looked up. The cat was in the middle of Zafar Road, where a Mercedes had just skidded to a halt. The cat, a little orange spot now in the grimy street, looked both ways at the traffic which it had halted, and started off again towards the other side. Picking its way through the cars, it had almost made it to the other side, and it was difficult to see the cat as the traffic started moving again, and interposing; but I watched as the cat started trotting away. I didn’t see the green Peykan four-door that rolled the cat up into a fender until it had actually done so. It simply came out of nowhere and with no effort to avoid the cat, no effort to slow down or steer away, it barreled towards the cat, which, panicking, ran straight under it between the driver’s-side wheels only to get swept up and rolled around by the pas- senger-side rear wheel. One second I saw it scared, in the lane; the next I saw it flying through the air, having been forcibly ejected from a wheelwell. Even over the sounds of traffic and birdsong and vendors selling their newspapers with last night’s box scores in them I could hear the sickening sound of the cat hitting the asphalt, a sound at once both dull and piercing. Then, without even thinking, I was running across Zafar myself, never taking my eyes off the cat, which was dragging itself towards the gutter. Its spine was broken and its hind legs useless, and it bled from every opening in its shattered body. Pink guts trailed out of its ruptured abdomen, and by the time I had got over to it, it had dragged itself to the gutter and laid down in its death throes. Soon its gut stopped pulsing and its eyes opened a tad, and the last frothy bubbles of blood blew out from its mouth. It was dead. Now, I had at that time never seen anything die before in my life. Well, I’m not counting insects and whatnot, but vertebrates and the like. Well, I’d seen fish die, but that was only because I’d gutted them myself, and besides, they weren’t animals like this cat, right? But I’d never seen anything with fur die, never seen any warm- blooded animal die. I’d never seen anything I’d just fed, die. I didn’t know what to think, or do; so I sat dumbly staring at the lifeless corpse for a minute, until I realized I had just missed my bus and would have to find my own way to school. The locals looked at me funny when I returned from the cornershop with a few plastic bags and began, using two bags as gloves, putting the cat into a third bag. They shook their heads, I suppose, at my lack of concern about parasites, or diseases. In fact, thinking about it now, it was a rather stupid thing of me to do; but I just could not stand the thought of that cat just laying there, sprouting vermin, espe- cially considering it was right across the street from my bus stop and so I’d have to look at it for a week or so, at least; and I knew that not looking was not an option. I could not not look. So I worked the cat into a bag, and, not having any dirt nearby in which to bury him, found a dumpster and saw him off. Went home and cleaned up after that, and got my moneystash out. A cabride to school was going to be expensive, eating up most of the money I had saved up, but I didn’t fancy the thought of learning the city bus routes on the fly; nor did explaining an unexcused absence to my parents bemuse me. They were just beginning to realize that my sister was re- writing the book on truancy and thus bound to be unhappy over this. So I washed up (even though I hadn’t gotten messy, I still cleaned up -- I felt dirty), got my money, and grabbed a cab to school. I spent the rest of the day in a funk, causing Ms. Amaran even to take note, and was still blue when I got home. As I came in the door, my mom greeted me. “The school called me at work today. They said you were late?” “Yeah, I missed the bus, and had to take a cab to school.” “A cab? That had to cost a fortune.” “Most all my savings,” I replied glumly. ”How’d that happen, James? I got you up and out in time, right?” “Well, yeah, but I saw a cat get run over at the bus stop, and it freaked me out. I missed the bus, so I took a cab to school.” “Why didn’t you just stay home?” “I don’t know, Mom. I figured you and Dad would get mad if’n I did.” “Mad? Lord, no. Why would you think that?” “Mom?” “Mmhmm?” “I wasn’t really thinking, you know?” And then I got mad at myself, because I felt hot tears stinging my eyes. “I’ve just never seen anything die before.” She just held me tightly, and I’ll bet she knew probably well before I did that I was crying because I knew that if that cat could die, alone and helpless in an uncaring world, we all could; but she didn’t say a word, just cradling me stroking my hair while I leak- ed. Soon I stopped. “We’re all going to die, aren’t we, Mom?” “Yes, Jim. We’re all going to die.” She looked at me serenely. “I don’t want to die, Mom. And I don’t want you to die, or Dad, or even Susan.” “Of course not, JJ. But it’s not a matter of what you want, hon. It’s the only promise we have. That’s why your dad and I are always griping at you and Susan to get along. One day we won’t be here, and you two will be each other’s family.” Tears sprung again to my eyes. “Don’t say that!” I cried. “It’s the truth, Jim.” “I guess you’re right,” I finally said. |
| Posted by Thumpalumpacus - 08-22-2021, 09:11 PM |
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21. Gambling After settling into our new flat, my first thought was to cruise Zafar on my bike, and see what I could see. I’d been through the neighborhood before, on my way to school or the CRC or the Co-op, but always in a bus or cab, which, while imparting the feel of a neighborhood, is not the ideal way to learn it. I’ve found, in my travels, that the best way to get to know a neighborhood is to get completely and thoroughly lost in it. Only then, I think, does a person really get to the little nooks and crannies of a borough, away from the main drag. It’s only then that one goes places one would never visit otherwise, the back alleys and by- ways. Alleys I’d normally pass by with nary a glance get a complete inspection, if for no other reason than that of looking for egress, and then in the process I’ll learn things like: where the stores are which sell the freshest goje ferangi. Where I can find the cheapest Marlboros. Or a getaway needed for a Caper. You know, useful stuff. So it was that on the next Thursday I hopped on my new bike and headed down Zafar. I had gotten my bike over the summer, saving allowance money and getting matching funds from my parents. A Diamondback BMX racing machine, it was a sleek candy-apple red thing, light, and designed for abuse. I had saved for almost a year, half my allowance each week, to come up with my half of the three hundred dol- lars it had cost; but this cost was irrelevant when stacked against the benefit of freedom on a scoot designed for my kind of abuse, for, even if it wasn’t a moped like what Cory rode, it meant that in one day my radius of action was now about quadrupled -- and I could jump down flights of stairs, too. I put that freedom to good use our first week- end on Zafar. Rising early in the morning -- awakened by Foreigner on the radio -- I had, during my shower, a decision to make: east or west? East was the closest alternative, being as how Zafar was T-boned by Old Shemiran road not but about a hundred or so yards away. A few hundred yards up north from that intersection lay the mini-bazaar, and beyond that, the CRC. Past that, the Co-op, with its American goods, horribly overpriced -- but the Pepsis there tasted normal. Old Shemiran, one of the main drags in town, would on this sunny weekend being thronging with people, a condition I lov- ed at the time and only learned to detest upon returning Stateside, where I grew to love quiet country nights. The fruit stands would be thronging with kids, the cafes with men smok- ing cigarettes and drinking tea, and while this was all promising, it was also familiar. West was new ground for me. Well, once past Jordan Avenue it was terra nova. I had been through the intervening two-and-a-half miles daily on the bus to school before I’d transfer- red to Community, and so had a good idea of that stretch of Zafar. But once west of Jordan, I would be on the blank part of the map, and each sight would be new, each sensation fresh. And that decided me. West it would be. The morning was brilliant, I saw once I was outside, a beautifully sunny August morning, the sunlight dissipating the morning’s mist and I settled into the seat and began pushing pedals. Passed the Wimpy’s, a British burger franchise which sold plastic-tasting burgers and grease-soaked french-fries, passed the Sony store and the police substation, and it wasn’t too long that I passed Jordan Avenue, too, and was into new territory. Of course, nothing changed; the storefronts were iden- tical, dark, musty things, with the smells of food being cooked and fruit going bad and old men playing dominoes in a nicotine haze drifting into the street. Hand-lettered signs were pasted on the sides of the old, worn buildings, which I couldn’t understand as they were in Arabic script. It seemed I had been pedaling for the better part of history when I saw the Sheraton tow- er rising higher, ivy-covered gray granite punc- tuated by white marble balconies, with its feet- high red lettering at the top of the fifteen- storey structure. I had been there once or twice -- coming from the south on Pahlevi Avenue -- but not since the American Club had been opened across the street last year. And it was the American club, at the corner of Zafar and Pahlevi, that was the real pur- pose of my decision to head west. I had to see this new place. It was a low-slung tan building surrounded by a brick wall around eight or so foot high, with ivy -- presumably related to the ivy on the Sheraton across the street -- on all ver- tical terra cotta surfaces; a pleasing contrast of off-white and lively green. Locking my bike to the wrought-iron gate which allowed entrance, I paid the two hundred rial entrance fee and walked in. It was, to an eleven-year-old boy, a small slice of heaven. Off to my right, I saw a huge swimming pool and next to it a Jacuzzi -- I’d heard of them, Jacuzzis, but this was the first I had seen -- and to my left was a playground with a large, grassy field, on the far end of which stood a dilapidated steel jungle-gym. A tall set of double-doors stood at the top of a short flight of stairs, beckon- ing entrance into the main building, which was, again, ivy-covered, terra cotta with the occasional picture-window, through which I saw nothing due to the dark tinting . I went in. Inside was dark. The brown carpet looked damned near black in the dim lighting, which consisted mainly of the light thrown by a line- up of pinball machines. Eight Ball. Playboy. Deuces Wild. All the good games. I was going to have a good time here; this was a better selection of silverball than any other in town. Faux-brasiers on the wall added little light but much atmosphere. But then, on the same wall as the pinball machines, separated by some fake potted ferns, I saw them: three one-armed bandits. Now, I’d never played the slots in my life, but, being a good American, I damned well knew what they were, and I forgot for the time being my favorite pinball games. Visions of riches danced in my head. The five hundred rials in my pocket could be made into twenty-five hun- dred, enough for the B-17 at the toy store on Old Shemiran with plenty left over for play- money, and so I didn’t even deign to glance at the dartboards or ice cream bar or tae- kwan-do sign-up sheet on the wall. I went straight to the change machine, threw in two one-hundred rial notes, collected my eight coins, and lost my mind. My first pull got nothing, but my second hit three lemons, dropping a small stream of silver into the payout bin. Clinkety-clinkety- clinkety-clink rang musically in my ears, and I was up a few hundred rials. In went anoth- er coin, down came the arm, ‘round went the wheels, and, if I got lucky, out came the money. As it was, I came out lucky often enough. I went home a couple of hours later, about a thousand rials in my pocket -- not as much as I’d envisioned, but more than I’d brought. I had to share this news with someone. Here was a way to make a buck or two! Here was a way to turn an allowance into a fortune, and it simply wouldn’t be right for me to keep it to my- self; so I unlocked my bike and sped home to call Cory. He was out, so I called Greg. He was out, and so I called Mike, who, though he was in, wasn’t much interested, as he lived on the south end of town and rarely came up this way. But there was Mom in the living room, and so I left the telephone alone and told her the great news, that I’d parlayed a few hundred rials into a small fortune. “Gambling? You gambled?” Well. I’d never seen it as “gambling”, I suppose. “I guess, yes’m.” “James, you know you’re not to be gambling.” “But, Mom --” “But nothing. You can keep what you have, but don’t do that again. Gambling’s not right. You know that, Jim.” “But it’s my money, Mom!” “No, it’s your allowance, and that means it’s our money which we allow you to have. If you’re to be gambling with it, well, then, perhaps we should review what it is you’re allowed to do.” “You’re no fun, Mom.” “I’m not supposed to be fun. I’m your mom.” Gah. That left Sue. She wasn’t home at the moment, but when she arrived an hour later, I was bursting at the seams to tell her about my day; and a more receptive audience I could not have prayed for, for, when Sue heard the news that money could be had at the Club, she was gung-ho for a visit. Or per- haps it was the fact that she’d learned of a new thing forbidden us that whetted her appetite. “You say you won how much?” “About a thousand rials,” I answered. “A thousand?” “Yeah, or thereabouts.” “And how much did you have going in?” “Maybe five hundred or so,” I told her. “And the parents don’t want us going there?” “What is this, twenty goddamned questions? I told you, Mom put it off-limits.” “I just want to make sure I have my facts straight,” she said blandly. “I mean, if I’m going to be breaking rules, I want to know it.” “Oh, you’ll be breaking rules, all right.” “We will be,” said my sis. “Well, yeah, there’s that.” “Show me where it is.” “I already told you, the corner of --” “No, show me,” she interrupted. “Show me.” “Jesus please us,” I said, exasperated. “I don’t have a bike,” she pointed out. “That means we’re taking a cab, and that means you gotta be there. I mean, I can say ‘the corner of this and that, ‘but I still won’t know what it looks like, or how to get in, or what- have-you.” “Christ, since when have you needed a guide into trouble?” “Shut up, dillrod. You’ve done good for me up ‘til now; why change?” She had a point. The next morning was Friday, the Muslim Sabbath, and so the streets were quiet as we took the four-hundred-rial ride down to the end of Zafar. She paid the cab-fare, after an argument, but I had told her to either pay the fare or buy a bike, which decided the issue. I was full of worry, feeling irrationally that the parents knew exactly where we were and what we were doing, although they hadn’t a clue. We’d told them we were headed to the mini-bazaar not too far from here, a story that allowed us both reduced finances and anonymity, for even the mini-bazaar was, on weekends, thronging with people. Even if they thought to check up on us, the chances of finding us would be slim, and we could always plead circumstances -- “We must have been at the other end” -- the thought still played in the back of my mind that they knew we were up to no good. The feeling didn’t, however, dampen the day. We got to the Club about eleven-ish, and made beelines for the bandits, which sat quietly empty, beckoning, and, for one day, it seemed as if the gods themselves were on our side, for, no matter the wager, no matter the amount we put into those dastardly money-holes, they paid out, with three lemons, or watermelons, or the occasional set of three bars. It was a run of luck for the books, one where every touch brought fortune and every coin brought four. Myself, I might have drawn a blank on three or four pulls, but that was it; any other time I seized that black knob, three bars showed up, and money for which I could not account became my own. Would that life were always that kind! We left in the small of the afternoon, perhaps two o’clock or so, with so much silver we had no idea what to do with it. In the cab we decided, consi- dering that our activity was not approved, that we’d best hide our good fortune, and so we filled not only the pockets in our Levi’s, covered by un- tucked shirts, but our socks, for Christ’s sake, our socks, with twenty-five-rial pieces, and stopped off at a kuche where we spent about what we’d set out with on mindless knick-kacks. Now, how to spend my two or three thousand rials? The equivalent of about forty-five dollars, such expenditures weren’t hidden well, and would be sure to attract the attention of the adults; so I decided to merely sit on it, and spread out my outlays in the hope that an extra couple of hun- dred wouldn’t be noticed. A few bottles of paint for my models here, a set of stickers for my bike there, and I figured to run it all past them with nary a squeak or a whistle. That is, until Sue got caught smoking again . She’d been smoking near the window of the living room, blowing the smoke out the window, one day when Mom came home early. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’d told her to smoke in the back of the parking garage, where cabs never approached, but no, she was convinced that rou- tine was routine for a reason, that the parents never got home before four-thirty, and so when one day Mom came home at two-thirty, Sue got caught red-handed at the window, pack in pocket, and Mom exercised her duty to find the rest of the contraband and searched Sue’s room. Of course, Sue had lost all her smokes the mo- ment Mom walked in, because she always kept all of her frajos on herself at all times; but Mom didn’t know this. So, as she searched Sue’s room, she found not one extra cigarette, but she did find a sock-full of coins, old-style coins dated thirteen fifty-four and newer, shiny seventy-seven pieces, and asked herself, and Susan, the logical question: “Where’d you get all this money?” Now, I wasn’t privy to that conversation m’self; when Mom had showed up I had made myself scarce, but soon enough I heard the story through the vent-shaft: “JJ.” I didn’t answer. “JJ!” I pulled the chair out from under my desk and set it under the HVAC vent over my closet. “What?” “She found my money.” “What’d you tell her?” “I told her it was baby-sitting money.” “That’s fucking brilliant. Are you ever paid in coins?” “Shut up, nimrod,” came the answer. “She believed me, and that’s all that matters.” “You sure?” Just then a knock sounded on the door, not l oud, but, given the circumstances, it was startling, and I damned near fell off’n that chair as I heard my mom call, “James?” “Yeah?” “May I come in?” This wasn’t false courtesy; the parents, bless their hearts, always stood on proper form and respected my privacy -- until I got busted. This was, at that moment, my one black fear. “James, I think we left a bill in a box in your closet,” she said as she before I could answer. “You sure?” I asked. “No, but I can’t find it in our stuff, and I think we have a box of paperwork in here,” she answered. We both knew she was wrong, that Dad was a stickler for receipts, and that he kept those -- and old bills, two years old, in a little metal box in the floor of their closet, but I couldn’t quite say “No” without perking up her already-searching antennae, and so I only held open my closet door and hoped she wouldn’t find my money-stash in a shoe-box atop the milk-crate bookshelf inside my closet. It was a vain hope. “What’s this?” she asked. “My savings,” I answered. “Where’d you get all this money?” she won- dered, removing the top to reveal a box-full of twenty-five-rial pieces. “Well --” “Don’t ‘well’ me, I know when you do that you’re spinnin’ yarns.” “I saved it.” “Didn’t we just buy a bike?” “Yeah.” “And weren’t you broke after that?” “Well --” “Don’t ‘well’ me.” “I won it gambling.” “I thought you said you won a thousand rials there.” “I did.” “There must be at least three grand here,” she countered. “Mmhmm,” I agreed complacently. “Well?” I struggled to think of a good story, a suit- able, non-impeaching explanation, and the work must’ve been visible on my face. “You went back there, huh?” “No, I didn’t.” “Well, then why are you and Sue both swim- ming in money at the same time?” “Uh -- hmm -- eh -- we both save some of our allowances?” “You might as well tell me the truth, James.” So I did. We were caught anyway. Lying would only make it all worse. Instead of a simple punishment for disobedience, I’d be looking at a compound sentence for the extra crime, which appealed to me not at all; and why lie when the only purpose ser- ved was to protect my sister who was al- ready caught? So I told the truth, how we had had our fantastically lucky day, how we’d lied about where we had gone, and how we’d snuck the coin into the house in our socks and underwear, because we had so much. And although I suffered punishment for this truth- fulness, in the form of grounding with extra chores, it still paid out, for, being the first one to spill the beans -- bless her heart, my sister had withstood the fiercest interrogation this side of the gulags without divulging a fact -- being the first to come clean had one benefit; it allowed me to lean on my Halo, if only a little, and assert that I was being the co-operative one; and though the erosion of my innocence cannot have gone unnoticed by my parents in this period where I was approaching adolescence, this sackcloth-and- ashes gig permitted them to maintain their illusions a while longer, a luxury they immed- iately grabbed hold of and didn’t let go. They wanted desperately to believe that one of their kids actually listened to them, even if he had been led astray, and I, in my selfish- ness, did nothing to disabuse them of this notion. Susan, to this day, reminds me that I didn’t just drop the dime, but rather, a silver dollar, on what could’ve been our cash cow. We’ll be drinking rum late into a Great Lakes winter evening, playing Ten Thousand and shooting the shit, when out of nowhere she will dredge up her cry: “We could’ve gotten away with it, if you’d only kept your mouth shut.” This, perhaps, might be the story of my life: I talk too much. |
| Posted by Thumpalumpacus - 08-15-2021, 02:12 PM |
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*************** 1977 *************** 20. Zafar I don't know why we moved from the apartment on Alvand. I think, looking back, that it had something to do with the rental contract expir- ing while we were to be back in El Paso, but I couldn't say with any certainty. All I know is that one Thursday morning we had a rare visit from the Family Meeting Fairy, occasioned in my case by a knock on my door as I was piec- ing together a 1:720 scale Ark Royal. "Yeah, come in," I called, not looking up from the flight-deck elevator I was installing. "Come out to the den, please, JJ. We need to talk to you and Sue," my mom said through the door. Oh, Christ. They must've learned about some- thing we'd done. Although it had been months since we'd pulled any major capers with the Expats, we were kids, and thus liable for any number of minor offenses committed in the course of daily events. To that fact add the consideration that we were Jessup kids, and you can see why, when we were summoned for a family meeting, we automatically started destroying files, mentally speaking. Such were my worries as I gingerly set my ship down, propping the elevator stays so that they'd be free of glue, permitting it to operate; and then I went out to face the music. Susan was already out there, with Mom and Dad, sitting at our round patio table that we kept indoors during the cooler months and hadn't gotten around to replacing in the back- yard, although the spring was proving to be a very hot one. I saw immediately that there was no tension at the table, and so I felt my- self relax as well. They hadn't found out about the cigarettes, or the Gold Circle wars, or . . . . well, they were in the dark, let us say, and leave it at that. In fact, I could see Dad actually smiling, was that it? Smiling? How long had it been? I was still computing this when Mom spoke up. "We've got some good news, kids. We're going home!" "When summer vacation starts?" Susan asked. "No, this isn't a vacation," Mom answered. "We'll be going back for at least nine months, and may- be we'll be staying." I don't think our reaction was exactly what they were expecting. Susan was happy, of course; although she liked living here, it wasn’t home to her, I think. Plus, entering her adolescence, she was fully caught up in boyfriends and makeup and whatnot, commodities in short supply here, I sup- pose. On the other hand, the prospect of returning was an unhappy one for me. Not as gregarious as my sister, I would have a harder time making friends, and the last few months had already been the occasion for too many goodbyes anyway, by my reckoning, what with George and Kerry moving back home.. "Isn't it great?" Mom asked again. "Uh, yeah," I answered. "When are we leaving?" "At the end of September," said Dad. "Although there might be a little play in there. And answer your mother ‘yes, ma’am’,” he warned. "Oh, cool," Susan and I said, nearly in unison, for different reasons each. "Where will we be going?" I asked. "And why?" asked Sue. "I've got a school in El Paso that the company wants me to attend," Dad answered. "We should be there at least seven months, maybe longer. But I'm going to try and get us back over here," he added. Our response to this last comment was as equally split as it was to the first news, for Sue’s face drop- ped a little, while I smiled for the first time that day. We shall return. The bafflement of our parents was plain, trying to read our reactions, but this bothered me not in the least. We shall return. And when I went back to my model building, I found it hard to concentrate, for, as I could suss it out, it was the best of both worlds: a long vacation, fol- lowed by a long return engagement. We'd had one vacation, in 1976, that'd lasted for three weeks, but for us kids it was not a vacation. Mom and Dad parked us with Grandma Redding, who, while she asserted herself pleased to see us, seemed to concentrate her thoughts on making our days a waking nightmare. It was at this time, in July of seventy-six, that Susan and I first took to calling her the "Evil Grandma", or simply "the Witch". I know these are uncharitable thoughts, especially concerning one's own grandmother, but this was no normal Grandmother. Grandma Redding was short, just a tad taller than I, with orange hair shot through with gray streaks. Like all grandmas, she was plump, and wore glasses; but unlike most others she lived by herself in a blue- and-white trailer since she had killed her husband in ‘64 with a gunshot to the head. She had, apparently, caught him cheating. She was always baking apple pies and muffins, or frying okra breaded in cornmeal, and mornings in that trailer were deliciously odiferous affairs too, with bacon and eggs sunny-side-up and sausage links and hash browns and cinnamon toast and fresh juice and milk filling up that small aluminum "tornado trap", as she called it, with a symphony of smells. After spending a couple of days there pro forma, our parents headed off to the Dallas / Fort Worth area, about two hours down the road, and spent the next two weeks there; and once our parents left, Grandma Redding turned a leaf we knew she'd been dying to turn since we'd gotten home. Now we had to wake up at seven-thirty in the morning so that we could watch first Oral Roberts and then Jimmy Swaggart. We had to get our religious edu- cation, and actually I'm very thankful she enforced this viewing of these two particular buffoons; for in their antics I saw a falsity that eventually led to my questioning and subsequent rejection of faith. If she happened to catch us not paying attention, she'd scold us, and for repetitions of the offense she'd mete out ten minutes standing in the corner -- looking at the television during the sentence. I spent many a morning standing in the corner, watch- ing those two overemotional hacks while smelling the wonderful morning smells of that trailer. After breakfast, and helping the gals clean up, which was never too much of a problem, I was free to take my BB gun out into the woods and do some hiking, if I so desired, and believe me, I couldn't have trim- med much more off'n my time out the door without rousing her suspicions. I would smear calamine lotion on my arms and legs, and lace up my boots, make a sandwich and stuff it and an apple in my backpack, and then grab my gun and head off to do Manly Things. This was my favorite part of visiting her. East Texas was, at the time, covered by hardwood stands stretching miles in length, miles of maple and pine and white oak and dogwood and poplar and cotton- wood; and Grandma Redding lived out in the middle of nowhere. Aside from my Uncle Rip, who lived about three hundred yards down the road, the near- est neighbor was four miles away. Mr. Williams owned all of this land, except for the Jessup plot and the Redding plot, but he was kind enough to permit me free tramp of his land, so long as I took my own trash out, and I availed myself of his gener- ous offer every day, for, as my sister told me, I could either hike, or listen to grandma's soap operas all day, and watch her dip snuff, and listen to her talk about matters biblical during commercials. I probably would've taken up hiking had Grandma lived in the Gobi Desert; that she lived in such beautiful country was a bonus. Plus, Grandma's dog Tippy was probably the most annoying canine I have ever in my life seen. The damned dog was a Chihuahua born in a poodle's skin, and perennially horny, to boot, and Grandma would act as if we invited his sexual favors; but if we mis- treated him in any way, she took offense to that, too. If there is a Hell for dogs, I'm hoping Tippy is doing the Canine Hotfoot there as we speak. I hated that son of a bitch. While I was hiking, that three weeks was a vacation; but vacations don't happen four hours each day; they are supposed to come in larger blocks of time. So on the whole, us kids didn't count the time spent at Grandma Riden's house as a vacation. For us, it was a sentence to be served, with no time off for good behavior. Little wonder that, after ten days, our parents, on returning to pick us up and take us to visit Grandma Vaughan -- the Good Grandma -- they wore looks of confusion at the exceedingly warm reception they received from their normally restrained children. This, then, explains our relief at our return not be- ing merely a vacation. For, though we might visit Grandma Redding, it'd be short, perhaps a few days, and then we’d be gone. Our vacations there lasted forever. At the other end of our response, I learned in that day that I'd become rather attached to living in Iran, and in the same way that an outside cat fears being locked inside, I feared living in Texas again. I was afraid that I'd find it boring, which, given our desti- nation, was a perfectly legitimate fear. El Paso, after all, is about as exciting as a paint-drying race, if my memory served me correctly; but the last time we'd been there, I was eight and hadn't any of this world- liness since imbued by our travels. Perhaps I simply hadn't known what to hunt up. Perhaps I hadn't known how to live. But perhaps, now that I had some idea of the world and what it holds, El Paso wouldn’t suffice. And if my premonition was accurate, if I missed Teheran too much, Dad had already said he'd be trying to bring us back over here, so either way, I was covered. Not a vacation, and not moving back. As I went back to my model, visions of a thick steak at the Montana Mining Company restaurant in downtown El Paso danced in my head. Not long after this, we were told we had one week to get packed, and, at first, I thought the decision had been made to move back to America. I was crushed, but did my best to keep it from the parents, especially my dad, for he'd be brutal in his lack of sympathy, even though he himself I think wanted to stay. It was with a leaden heart that I received my allotment of boxes for my personal goods. Not only were we moving, but three months early, to boot. I was still packing my stuff sullenly a few days later when Susan burst into my room. "Goddamnit, Sue, do ya mind knockin'?" "Shut up, pud," she laughed. "I just learned that we're not moving back." "No? What's this for, then?" I motioned at the semi-packed boxes on my floor. "We're moving over to Zafar." "Zafar? They have apartments on Zafar?" "Yeah, they do, down towards Old Shemiran Road. I saw a picture of it on the bar just now, and when I asked Mom what it was, she said it was our new place." I was grinning broadly now. "You're sure?" "Go ask her, moron! Of course I'm sure." An un- pleasant smile underlined our diverging appreci- ation of this turn of events. "You know what, Sue? I don't want to go back home." "You don’t?" "I want to stay here. I like it here. I want to grow up here, and then go back to Texas, when I'm older." "Well, that's not gonna happen, you can forget about it. You know we can't stay here forever." "I know. But that doesn't mean I can't want it." I taped up a box, marked it "desk--James", and pushed it off to the side. Susan laughed. "Want in one hand and shit in the other," she stated our aphorism: "See which one fills up first." "Yeah, I know." I started in on another box. My work wasn't so desultory, now that I knew we weren't headed back just yet. "I've grown to like this place. And it sounds weird, but it feels more like home than Texas does, to me." "Really?" "Yeah, really. All my friends are here. We never saw much of the family in El Paso anyway, and I bet we won't this time, either, so that's nothing different from here. And you know as well as I do that we couldn't get away with half the stuff we pull here back home." She laughed again. "Yeah, blonde hair and blue eyes don't mean a damn thing there. And it cer- tainly won't protect us." "I just hope Dad meant it when he said he would try to bring us back." "He does," she answered, flipping her blonde hair out of her face. "I heard him saying to Mom the other day that he could never give us all this back home, that here we're living like kings." "We are?" I looked around. "This ain't no palace." "Shut up, doofus. Sure, we live in an apartment, not a house. How many houses have you seen here?" She let the question sink in. "Exactly -- none. And this is a big place. And we're going to private schools, bro." "Big deal, school is school." "Have you ever asked yourself how much money Mom and Dad are spending trying to educate you?" There was a slight sarcastic emphasis on the word "trying". "Well, no." "Thousands of dollars, Jim. Look, you don't remem- ber schools back home, but I do. Watch, even a moron like you will take what you've learned here and do good in school back there." She slid off my desk. "I gotta go finish packing now. Don't worry. Dad'll bring us back." "Hey," I called as she walked off. "What?" "Next time, knock, damn it." "If you say so," she laughed. I got the distinct im- pression of insincerity in her manner. Then she was gone. Our new apartment was smaller, but nicer. The outer walls of the four-storey building were sheath- ed in white marble. It had a courtyard with a guard gate manned, I was told, by a city police- man; the blue uniform he wore was typical of the gendarmerie -- light blue shirt, dark blue trousers, and a bus-driver cap with an eagle on the crest -- what Dad called the “Screaming Chicken”. Behind the guardhouse the courtyard spread out, with a granite-covered ramp leading into an underground parking garage. A small corner of the courtyard was left free of stone, and there small weeds eked out what was plainly a miserable existence. We reached the fourth floor breathless from the stairs which wrapped around the elevator that Dad wouldn't let us use. The stairwell too was finished in marble, and echoed brightly every sound within. Sue and I looked promisingly at each other -- we wouldn't be surprised in media res by parents returning early here; even if they used the elevator we'd be sure to hear when they got in on the first floor. Hell, you could hear the silence in that hallway, it was that reverberant. The theme of marble extended to our new place, which was floored in marble. Having sussed out the outside a bit, I made a beeline to the front- side of the building, and sure enough found two of the three bedrooms. I staked my claim on the non-master with a balcony and started examining my quarters. The room was small, perhaps eleven by twelve feet, much smaller than what I was used to, but it had a huge closet, and the balcony beyond the sliding glass door added another thirty or forty square feet to my living area. Above the closet was an air duct, and upon inspecting it as a possible stash for contraband, I saw that it also fed Sue’s room, passing about five foot through, over the hallway in between our rooms. Even when we were both grounded, we’d still be able to plot. I turned and went out on the balcony. As I stood outside in the morning sun, I could see Zafar from Old Shemiran Road almost all the way over to Jordan Avenue, about three or four miles away. We were very near to the CRC and at the other end of Zafar was the American Club -- nothing at all on my bike, maybe four or five miles. Through the sum- mer morning's haze, I could make out the high-rise Sheraton Hotel on the intersection of Zafar and Pahlevi, a good seven miles downroad. To the south, marching up over the horizon through the already-smoggy air, were the dim forms of down- town Teheran's skyscrapers. The neighborhood around our apartment bustled with activity. In contrast to our old place, here we were in the middle of the city, in the business district, and the air was alive with energy. The cries of the street vendors and horns blaring inter- mingled with the smell of lamb cooking and auto exhaust to create the impression of overwhelming chaos. The sidewalk thronged with people, some haggling the vendors, some marching purpose- fully into the day; others sat begging or on a bench waiting for the city bus; through them all raced bicycles and scooters. It was indeed chao- tic -- or perhaps finely choreographed? The twain had met and were seemingly inseparable. "Let's get started, Jim." My dad's voice pulled me out of my reverie, as I noticed a wrought- iron gate open in the courtyard below, permit- ting a Mercedes cargo truck with "Raytheon" stenciled on its side entrance and so we went down to unload our possessions. This was going to be fun. |
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