Semaphores

[Thumpalumpacus]

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.’”

[Thumpalumpacus]

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.

[Thumpalumpacus]

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.

[Thumpalumpacus]

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.”

[Thumpalumpacus]

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."

[Thumpalumpacus]

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.”

[Thumpalumpacus]

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.

[SYZ]

Still going well...  

(Small double typo in #34...  ”The radio squawked, cutting
off our captor, The radio squawked, cutting off
our captor,")

[Thumpalumpacus]

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.

[SYZ]

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."

[Thumpalumpacus]

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."

Passing puppy love, to answer one question.

This spoiler will ruin your bated breath:

Show ContentSpoiler:

I haven't been able to find most of my friends from that era and so don't know if they survived. From earlier in the book, Kerry died in an auto accident in El Paso in Sep 1983, and Greg Porteous and the Porteii stayed in contact with us. His father Andy died about ten years ago but the others are still plugging along. Greg and I still occasionally talk on the phone or chat on FB.

Leb, Mike, Angus, and all the rest, we lost touch. I still sometimes prowl Facebook looking for them, to little avail, though I recently learned of a Mike in San Antonio who might be a match.

[Thumpalumpacus]

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.

[SYZ]

Next chapter?    

[Thumpalumpacus]

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.