The facades of Muslim society are manifold and misleading, few things are in reality as they seem to be from the outside. Of course, I only dimly perceived these complexities of when I road in on the ferry… sprawled out conspicuously on the floor of one of the crowded passenger salons, fully dressed, flat on my back with no sheet or cover on a badly decayed sleeping mat, earplugs inserted, without cash and worn out by one of those days which span multiple international borders and in which the events of many days seem to be compressed.

That day started at midnight in Tel Aviv, when Nirman and his two female friends picked me on the corner in the quiet northern neighborhood where I had been staying with the family of an Israeli soldier I met in Brazil on the boat to Ilha Grande. Nirman and I had met in Switzerland in a hippie community, and I was happy to see him again. We kept remarking how strange it was to be reunited. Nirman writes well, plays the guitar, can sing in Portuguese, speaks Italian, and lives pretty leisurely. I had my old faithful red Jansport backpack, a guitar in case, and a cheesy straw cowboy hat given to me by my close friend days earlier. We rolled in their hatchback through the windswept desert night and stopped at four in the morning at an ashram to drop off one of the girls, who was on a little sabbatical for the remainder of her pregnancy. There was a sign on the side of the road, ‘Ashram’, with a little drawing of palm trees. There was not a soul stirring in the ashram; the only sound was a slight rustling of the palm leaves grinding against each other in the wind. We helped ourselves to some figs and fruit, stretched, and skedaddled. Then, we drove on, down into a dry valley with jagged rocks all around. Around six, we arrived in Eilat, the Israeli town close to the Egyptian and Jordanian border. It was just before dawn, and they had to find an ATM for me, because, as usual, I didn’t think about the exit-tax and had no money. Afterwards, we parked the car in the parking lot of a big resort hotel, of which there are several, and walked, with the Red Sea and the dry mountains of Jordan to our left, towards the official bullshit buildings, at the southernmost point of Israel.

We were among the first people through the Israeli side of the border that day and passed through quickly. On the other side, in the empty, apparently neutral, and heavily guarded space between the national boundaries of Israel and the Egypt, there stood a few hundred mostly Russian tourists, the pupils of their blue eyes retreating from the morning light, and those eyes, all frozen stolid and grouchy as they looked at nothing in particular, bored, waiting in line. The walls conducted us towards a duty-free space with resplendent color, hypnotizing arrays of bottles, techtoys, cigarettes, and ties all in a row. Nirman and his girlfriend didn’t bat an eyelash at the arrays, all business. I followed their brisk pace up to the Egyptian building, with the black eagle emblem over the red white and black striped flag. Inside, already it was the atmosphere of Egypt. The guards were all slouching in their chairs, looking gruff in their white uniforms tucked into black boots. One stood up and saluted us with noticeable grace, he was tall with dark heavy eyebrows and a mustache under which he smiled ironically.

We passed through one by one, the x-ray machine, scanning our bags, my guitar, my body. More guards awaited us on the other side, to revise our baggage. Nirman and his girlfriend disallowed the search of their bags. They weren’t having it. Nirman let the mustachioed guy rifle through his stuff until he came to the little ornate painted boxes and decorative coin purses, which looked, by their elegance, to be his most prized souvenirs, always on his person. I marveled at how protective he became when mustachioed man came to them. None of my shit was dear or beautiful like this. I let them rifle through it to their heart’s content, unconcerned. Behind me, Nirman and his lady snarled at me, Don’t let them go through your stuff! I turned back to the guards, two or three of them were digging through my bags with great interest, but I remained apprehensive and quiet. Then, one of the guards pulled out a pornographic magazine, oh crap, I had half forgotten about those. Still, no big deal, I thought, as each guard sat down with his own magazine. I had Penthouse, Kiss Comixx, and some generic hardcore magazine I picked up in Spain at some point. I began to get antsy as they turned page after page, with concentration not overpowered by their eagerness. They were digging it, heavily.

I was putting all my stuff back together, ready to go, when the mustachioed guy gestured for me to come with him, with the porn mags in hand. It dawned on me in that moment, that I had underestimated the situation. I didn’t realize that porn is illegal in Egypt. Businesses get shut down for it, people go to jail. Mustachio escorted me to the other side of the building and into a room full of jovial Egyptians, who, upon my arrival, became more jovial, to the point where the head official had to herd some of them out of the room. The balding head honcho was very stern indeed. He looked at every single page of each magazine, as well, taking the images in, slowly, almost sanctimoniously, appearing not to hear my earnest, if mispronounced, entreaties in Egyptian. I said, please, I came to Egypt to learn Arabic and to study Islam, I didn’t know, etc. etc. He kept his head bowed, and the room was filled with silence, except for occasional outburst of shouting and laughter from those jocose guys who just couldn’t contain themselves. I could understand the senior guy’s diligence, however, because, without access to such materials, those pages of hardcore Spanish sex must have been a real delicacy. When he completed his meditation on the German Penthouse, he made a neat pile of porn, put both hands upon it, and pushed it across the table to me, saying, with obnoxious disdain, “Take this back to Israel.”

My mouth dried out and my forehead perspired. My stomach tightened and I swallowed hard. Then, he said, “Don’t come back to Egypt for six years.” He was serious. My whole intended Egyptian adventure came crashing down around me. I tried to bargain, beg, and he didn’t budge. They wrote some stuff on a little form, put it in my passport, and handed it back to me. Then, they brought in my bags, handed me the magazines and moved to escort me out of the country. My faced burned with shame as I walked out of the office. I was disgusted and didn’t want to carry the magazines another step, but they intercepted me when I moved to dump the magazines in a trash can. Next thing I knew, I was in a line that didn’t move and miserable with hundreds of sweating, grumpy Russian tourists. It took two and a half hours, and the less than twenty year old Israeli girls who interrogated me with unnecessary severity and antagonism made me show them the magazines. I was in no mood to cooperate and remained tight-lipped and openly rude, against my better judgment, angrily.

I sat down at a bench outside of the compound, finally, to take account of the situation in relative solitude, as the sun shone on the Red Sea and the breeze practically massaged my skin. It was a gorgeous day, but I was in hell, for the moment. I was in shock, in desolation, disconsolate, then came the taxi drivers. With difficulty, I began to recount my story to a hack who spoke seven languages. He asked me, did they put anything on your passport? No, they just gave me this paper. Throw it away, he said, you can go to Jordan and then to Egypt on a boat and no one will know. I perked up. He was talking sense, leaning back on an elbow, exhaling a great, nooo proooobleeeem. We rolled by the shining sea in his Mercedes with the windows down, carefree, with his assurances bringing me untold comfort and relief. It was nearly eleven o’clock in the morning.

At the border station with Jordan, located in a desert no man’s land between the two mountain ranges straddling the Red Sea, I poured over the magazines one last time in the bathroom and tossed them in the trash, as I have done with dozens of porn stashes since my preadolescence, none of which caused me any consequences nearing the magnitude of expulsion from a foreign country. How humiliating. Another interview with an Israeli girl in uniform behind glass. Then, at gates of Israel, a barricade with sliding doors, a young soldier my age holding an automatic machine gun motioned for me to halt. This station is closed right now, mines are exploding! I said, in evident disbelief, really? He made a face and yelled, I wouldn’t joke about that! And just then, a blast came from within some kind of bustling tank. The logo said Mine Wolf. The machine churns up the dirt and gravel into a chamber in which explosions are contained. Boom, there was another eruption within the Mine Wolf. He looked at me, you see now? Then, the Israeli girl who had processed my passport came up, wanting to ask more questions about why I had just exited and re-entered Israel. Great. I gave her an excuse that sly taxi driver had concocted and it sent her scurrying away to her computer. A few minutes later, the Mine Wolf rested from its labors, and theb blond soldier waved me through.

Another official behind a window, this one took no more than a cursory glance at me, and stamped my passport. I turned towards the wall and was assailed by a fifteen foot tall painting of Jordan’s head of state. Fresh stamps on my passport put a spring in my step. Beyond the gov’t outpost, again I walked into insurmountable desert. The closest town is several miles away and the only other road leads up over the mountain range bound for Petra. Thus marooned, the tourist has no recourse against the predatory taxi drivers waiting by their cars with the evil grin of the price-gouger, no recourse except obstinacy! Guard towers stood on either side of the border, and some Jordanian taxi drivers had set up a tent where they contentedly drank tea in the absurd midday heat. I had already told them I wouldn’t pay their price, with a glint of stubborn will bordering on hatred in my eyes. As such, I stood alone, without water, heavily armed with bags, embittered against the arrangement which would charge me 8 USD to get to the port town of Aqaba, several miles hence. I started walking, fuck these people, I will walk until a car stops. Five minutes later, a taxi pulled up, in addition to wild gesticulating and shouting from the guards on the tower. The driver said, I am sorry, but you cannot walk here, this is the land of no man! After a gaze into the miasmal mirages greeting me in such a dehydrated state as I was there in the desert, I got into the cab, resignedly, and it conveyed me to my starting point. I sat, again, under the sun, faint, tired, deserted, but hardened with anger, as the king of Jordan displayed his profile, indifferent to my fate. Buses came and went. The taxi drivers cavorted under their tent. Then, a young man with slicked back hair and sunglasses drove up in a Subaru Outback and dropped off a young Israeli female avec backpack who he had invited into his house and to whom he had shown the sights of his country. I stopped him, putting my hands together in supplication, Will you take me to Aqaba? He nodded, yes of course. In addition to waxing philosophical about good will and equality, helped me change money, get a ticket for the evening ferry, and gave me his phone number, should anything go awry. His name was Fers.

This was the famed Arab hospitality that I had come in search of, no questions, no suspicions, no hesitation- just kindness and generosity. I found the Arabs to be a people like no other, possessed of a deep sense of integrity and honor not well passed down (or absent) in these generations of Western society with which I am most familiar. However, between us, me, as a Westerner, and the Arabs, there is a chasm. I am accustomed to a lifestyle that is outrageous to most Arabs. If we take the example of Hamad, the patriarch of the famed Cairo Trilogy of Naguib Mahfouz, I live the libertine lifestyle of Hamad’s nights, with wine, women, and music, without the stern and inscrutable respectability of his days during which the eyes of his family and of the community are ever upon him. Many of the Arabs I met didn’t have the possibility to travel outside of their region and indulge in the infamous half imagined orgies of the West fully clear of the idle curiosity, spying, and denunciations of their little gossipy neighborhoods.

In such a community, my friends in Old Cairo conduct all their illicit business with extreme secrecy, and, when it comes to having sex, with foreign girls or virginal Egyptian girls (in which case sodomy is the only option, unless she’s divorced), they do the nasty in their apartments usually only after bribing the doorman, in their cars on top of the mountain overlooking Cairo, in rented rooms in other cities, and in historic houses and sepulchers where they know people rarely go. I heard about scenes in which a police officer would discover an Egyptian kissing a foreigner in some secluded place and after two hours of shouting and threats, the couple would retire or else, the Egyptian would be hauled off to the police station. For making out. This strict definition of decency reigns in appearance only, for the children, for the sake of respectability.

I collaborated in writing text message poetry in English with my Egyptian friends who were romancing foreign girls. And romance we did, one poem we devised made a Finnish girl cry. They express themselves with rhapsodic poetry, yet it doesn’t sound cheesy coming from them. They pull off poetic flights seldom attempted any more in English. It was my impression that Egyptians are among the most virile and seductive men I’ve encountered in twenty voyages overseas. Whether they are indeed formidable lovers, I haven’t more than a few accounts, which were related to me by the men themselves, which is seldom reliable, and two or three women who expressed passionately opposing views. I wasn’t able to learn much beyond hearsay about the women personally although I did meet one or two at a Spanish Embassy party in Doqqi (off-the-hook, several phone numbers, no score). I have read articles written by Egyptian men about the other side of the Islamic veil, where sex is rampant and wildly experimental, women pick up men at special clubs and underground parties, and that prostitutes and willing university girls alike are prominent in the streets, making come-ons with the greatest care and subtlety, from beneath the veil. Besides some recent, controversial literature, it was this to which I was limited; to seeing, in the streets, their eyes and only their eyes, lustfully flashing at me or carefully riveted on the ground.

My first conversation in Arabic took place with an old man wearing a white embroidered skull cap and a flowing blue galabiya who approached me in one of the ferry’s salons. He was a grandfather and his progeny soon followed. They gave me some vegetables and pita bread, then grandpa tried to pressure me into showing him porn on my computer and asked me a lot of creepy questions, like does your girlfriend give you head? His daughter-in-law’s wide, smiling eyes were focused on me almost without interruption, but I couldn’t read if there was something beyond unadulterated curiosity and wonder in them. She was very beautiful, all in black, with a head scarf but no veil over her features. We talked, and they very openly made fun of me with a good-humor that seems to be ubiquitous across the Orient. Then, I passed out in my clothes on my crumbling shiny sleeping mat with earplugs inserted. I have a feeling that they continued to laugh and ponder over my strange prostrate figure at length while I slept. They asked me repeatedly when I awoke, “What will you do? Where will you stay?” In the end, I concluded, “Alatool! Daemon Alatool!” “Straight ahead! Always straight ahead!”

At dawn we arrived in some little port town of which the name eludes me. Literally hundreds of people were milling about, some travelers, traders, stevedores, drivers, movers, no doubt, some unemployed, loitering about, waiting for the ship to arrive. I stalked off away from the port with its shifting multitudes to the edges of the encampment. Half a mile away the buildings visibly decayed in abandon, unfinished, with their iron girders reaching naked towards the sky. A dozen shiny white pickup trucks without license plates were parked in a line and all was dormant, not a soul about. I walked into a disheveled one and a half story building and pitched my hammock on the second floor with one loop around the girders and the other through the window frame and around the edge of the incomplete wall. Then I slept like a king under a blue cloudless sky.

That night, I arrived by bus into the bustling metropolis of Cairo with its 17 million inhabitants and its 85 decibels of ambient noise. However, Cairo becomes a real small town faster than any other I know of comparable size. I still have an apartment rented there, which I will never live in, on account of how small a town Cairo can be. Everyday, the same insistent fast-talking guys are working the tourists around the roundabout of Talaat Harb, ‘Come and see my _____ shop!’ The same turban-wearing pock-marked men in long shirts, drinking sheesha and tea- the words is the same for both in Egyptian, “تيشرب“. East of the Nile, in the old neighborhoods of Khan el-Khelili and Darb al Ahmar, down the hill North and Northeast of the Citadel, the same discerning natives accost people from all over the world, to sell their carpets, jewelry, tapestries, sheesha pipes, chess and bat gammon sets, papyrus, perfume, spices, and the ambiance of old Egypt. I know that they are the same men, because I got had by a few of them, and when I learned to be wary, I started noticing who worked where and in partnership with whom.

I meet Egyptians on the streets of New York. One sold me a rose for 5$ while I was dining with a surpassingly beautiful girl outdoors on Union Square. I only surmised later that he probably picked it up along with untold hundreds on 28th Street between 6th and 7th Ave, where every day a menagerie is born and dies, leaving, of an evening, discarded carrion flower carcasses on the sidewalk. We left it as a tip for the waitress, because the service was bad. Another Egyptian took me in a dark gypsy cab to a loft party down underneath the Brooklyn Bridge. At the end, he pocketed an eight dollar tip with the claim that he hadn’t any change. Even outside Egypt I keep getting had by Egyptians.

When I first arrived, I had no orientation whatever and no map or address or friend. The conductor of the bus was an enormous man and I watched as he and two little guys nearly came to blows over the price as traffic blared all around them. I didn’t know at that time that traffic is the home away from home of Egyptians; they weave through it, permissively, perilously, and nobody bats an eyelash. I didn’t haggle over the price, and the conductor appointed a guy to guide me to the subway. I ended up at the crest of midnight in the hotel Al Hussein (60 Egyptian pounds, 12 US$ for the double room) in the Old City, Khan Al Khalily, after two hours of frantic search and traipsing around the area of Ataba Square, being told repeatedly that the cheapest flophouses don’t allow foreigners. Finally, I got a good tip from a hotel proprietor and the taxi whispered through the somber streets and I pressed to the window as we passed two daunting striped buildings separated by a gap with a wooden eve hanging over it at an angle, incomplete, cutting a shadow against the light of the moon. I saw calligraphy was engraved in black squiggly script on the stone wall. I remember thinking, that’s the most beautiful building I’ve ever seen.

That was to be a reoccurring thought during my stay in Egypt, inside and outside Cairo, especially in the oldest, poorest, and most forlorn places. The scenes of the Old City had a unique symmetry and correspondence, in the way things were constructed and arranged, by time and evolution, in the market stalls, in the dirt and the grime, pristine, from another time, in which marble, glass, and metal would be anachronistic; instead, there is dirt, concrete, brick, wood, rugs, and textiles. Many of the buildings are shoddy with age, others have become, as they live through the ages, only more dazzling and suggestive of a singular, sophisticated idea of space and design. It is the same with Egyptians textiles, those not made in China, the authentic papyrus, wall-hangings, rugs, chess sets, statues, and jewelry. And the Egyptians, earnest, conniving, persuasive, tenacious, indomitable, the shrewdest salesmen in all the world.

Cairo is a small town. My first morning in the Old City, I walked down the road which separated the two striped buildings with the hanging eve, and in the process, I met the two men with who I would hang out daily for the following three months. I met their friends, parents, girlfriends, and enemies, and accompanied them in everything they did, from the ultra cheap gym, to the meetings in their respective shops, to the whirling dervishes, and weddings.

Nothing amazed me like the weddings. Walking in is a ceremony in itself. I observed how my Egyptian friends became suddenly solemn, fussing individually over their appearance and adopting an aspect of great humility. Then, they would slowly walk from the darkness, to the wild lights and commotion of the wedding reception. A dozen men await at the entrance to greet newcomers and announce their arrival to the MC who yells the names into a microphone, which then assaults the air, with echoes and feedback, by means of a sound system performing well beyond its capacity. Tables are immediately carried over head and chairs slammed down in the dirt, a plastic cover with floral designs is placed on the table, two baskets of fruit quickly appear, a pack of cigarettes, big bottles of Stella, and then a chunk of hash the size from your thumb bounces into your midst, its origin unseen.

The sound… over-powering, drowning out words shouted in Arabic, the speakers pushed free and clear of sensible levels of volume, drums thumbing, synthesizers, flutes, and the shrill, trilling texture of Egyptian singing, and the constant babble of the MC, always interrupting the singer. The sound waves hit your ears like successive pancakes slapping you in the face. The sound like soup, swimming from the stage in waves, everything radiating electricity and vibrations that cause… discomfort? Not after you’ve drank and smoked for four hours, it is an intoxicating cacophony.

The lights… blinking, red, blue, yellow, naked 60 watt bulbs hanging in lines spanning the entire roof of the tent, which is composed of identical sheets, manifold, hanging, holographic, symmetrical designs in brilliant colors, developed over the centuries, like everything, a design that overwhelms the eye momentarily, dizzying it with geometry. Everywhere your eyes seek shelter, your ears silence, but none is to be had. Sensations like liquid clog each of your senses. Everywhere you look, light, people, laughing, gaping, dancing, clouds of smoke, synesthesia, with the sound besieging your eardrums. The reception is a menagerie, a feast of sensations, colors, light, and curves as manifest on stage as it they are concealed among the guests all in monochromatic robes and ninja suits.

The money… heaps of it in a pile on a chair by the synthesizer. Wads of it thrown up in the air, with mock abandon, over the stage, some men methodically peel the bills off one by one and let them fall to the floor, other men throw the whole wad over their heads and walk away, looking serious. Little kids scour the stage and the ground to collect stray bills, dutifully handing them to the guys who manage that heap of cash on the chair by the synthesizer. The MC is always carrying a grip of bills in one hand and the mic in the other, and he periodically throws a dozen bills in the air for effect. Everyone feels wealthy, I suppose, or that the value of money, and it’s primacy, has been somewhat and only momentarily diminished.

And the belly dancers… swaying, sultry, speaking to you with movement, approved lust, 300 men watching, their ears full of sounds, their eyes of light and movement, as they drink alcohol and breath smoke. The belly dancers were typically not very beautiful, their hair seldom its natural color, their eyeshadow like war paint thickly applied, their form rotund, often seeming irritable and bored, but even so, their grace and gyration left most of the audience speechless, with the combined effect of the intoxicants, the sound thick like honey, the lights blinding. Speechless. Not that it would matter what, if anything, is said, it goes unheard. And not just the belly dancer dances. Egyptian men dance flamboyantly, as precious few Western men dare, for fear of being called gay. The Egyptians have no such prohibitions. They dance in groups of only men, holding hands, I’ve even seen them sit on each other’s shoulders, the two men on top holding hands, like ye old swimming pool chicken fight, but on a stage instead. I saw this guy once, in an alley during a religious festival in Tanta, on the stage, just getting down, with his heels in the air, his hips all over, his hands he wiggled intricately at the wrist, it was courageous dancing, which left me astounded. He even split his britches. I’ve never seen the like. I couldn’t tell if he knew that the seat of his pants was busted, as he smiled at me, a genuine one-tooth-shy grin.

The hookah man approaches. They come, working the room. First, over a small crate full of two dozen ceramic pipes, a man leans, running a flame over the thumb-sized piece of hash to soften it and apportion part of it into the pipes. He loads each pipe generously. The Egyptian science of sheesha smoking. The hookah has a long bamboo tube which reaches across the table- all service comes from across the table to you sitting there, swaying heavily after the first hit and the second. More smoke than you ever thought possible comes from your exhalations. If you know what you are doing, a flame jumps out from the coals, which are heaped onto the ceramic pipe, and just as swiftly replaced. The coals are held in a metal sieve, which the hookah man waves to and fro, fanning the coals to an orange glow, then, he pitches them onto the sheesha, aflame, melting the hash into narcotic smoke.

My eyes are red after three hits. Three empty green 32 ounce Stella bottles sit on the table in front of me and a full one is in my hand. I have a stupid grin on my face and my eyes are half shut. I can’t even hear, much less understand, any of the shouting of my middle-aged companions, or of the MC, as he throws grips of Egyptian bills in the air. The hookah man goes to another table, and in a few moments, the camera crew comes. They have, mounted on one brave man’s shoulder, the biggest video camera I’ve ever seen, and a collection of wires run down the brave man’s back, trailing behind him on the floor like a serpent striated by duct-tape. Everywhere the camera man turns is suddenly alight, because of the massive light mounted above the camera. As he gapes into the black apparatus with one eye, the other remains tightly closed, and on his face as he turns the camera on me, a huge grin. The same with every man young or old whom your eye should happen to set upon, they smile. At a smaller wedding I went to in Darb Al Akmar, I met almost every member of a nine piece band, while they were playing, without words, just by smiling. A foreigner is a rather illustrious guest at these local weddings, it seemed to me. People were generous, too. Joints came to us, rolled to perfection the Egyptian way, as a gift from smiling guys at the next table. Amid the clouds of smoke, of Egyptian currency, and the din thick like the liquid in my bottle, I got so fucked up that my friends had to drop me off, not at the end of my block, but at the door to my hotel. Another night, I walked home escorted arm in arm by a smiling drunk 50-year-old Egyptian man. That’s how attentive they are.

Egypt was refreshing. Sure, Egypt is terrifically loud, dirty, dessicated, bureaucratic, corrupt, conservative, and really tough on dainty Western digestive systems, but the human element is refreshing. The Egyptians may be too macho, or too demure, too high-maintenance, shout at each other as a custom, pursue, grope, and badger tourists, gossip constantly about their neighbors, gather often into angry mobs, choose really annoying local pop songs for their cellphone rings, honk too frequently, always charge the foreigner three times more, and damn near always work a situation for personal profit. However, if you can look past these things, or just love them, you will also see that the Egyptians are articulate, diligent, generous, infinitely loyal to their friends and equally as curious about their enemies (and their friends), and astonishingly at ease in the 85 decibels of noise that is Cairo.

The Egyptians have a saying, Take from every country one friend and you live like a king. I think that Egypt may be one of the only places where a person could make a friend from literally every single country. The thing that weighs on me, and much more so on my Egyptian friends, is that they can’t as easily visit those friends all over the world to whom they opened up their home and heart so quickly. They’re pretty cramped there, flanked as they are by Libya, Sudan, Israel and the Seas, and they get really bored, lonely, restless. And with the hardships which assail them, unemployment, rising prices, overpopulation, political and social repression, noise and other annoyances, we might see many more emigrating to the West (there are already around 4 million), with more determination and ingenuity than most any American or European. I say, come on over, with a little nod to my friends, look alive, these Egyptians are world class wise guys.

]]> http://jetsethitchhiker.wordpress.com/2008/10/27/egyptian-odyssey/feed/ 0 timtolka http://jetsethitchhiker.wordpress.com/2008/06/25/subway-stories/ http://jetsethitchhiker.wordpress.com/2008/06/25/subway-stories/#comments Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:21:59 +0000 timtolka http://jetsethitchhiker.wordpress.com/?p=21 ]]> I caught the F train to Manhattan at 9 am and stood among heaps dreary-eyed people trying to mind their own business. Most people on the train take a gander at everyone else, only they are careful to dissimulate it. I guessed the nationalities of the various characters all around me, China, Philippines, Russia, Ecuador… What about the couple with the gaudy gold jewelry, sunglasses, and matching sports jerseys? Puerto Rican New Yorkers- Newyorkinos. The stalky guy with new brand-spankin’ new old Jordan’s, the hoody with neon silk-screened designs, and the too big baseball cap with the bill completely flat and the tag still on it? Brooklyn, I’d reckon. What about the three portly gentlemen with sombreros and guitars of different shape and sizes, singing an old ballad of Besame Mucho? Mexico, I’d bet my last ten bucks on it. What about the girl with the polka dot yellow dress and the shiny red heels, looking at me? Probably Japan, she’s almost too stylish to be Korean. New Yorkers are quick to size other people up, because the first impression is often the only impression you get in New York City. Most people put everybody else in a box at first sight, you automatically are whoever your outward indications suggest. Your clothes are a language of signs, and so your posture, your body type, your slicked back hair. That guy with the ostentatious shades, the scepter, and crocodile skin boots has dressed the part of a hustler, but who knows what he’s into. This girl in the yellow polka dot dress is… beautiful and still staring. I took out two suckers and offered her one, which she accepted, but we were both too shy to speak. The bedroom eyes were in full effect, however. The train bounced along through the dank tunnels, sometimes next to other mirrored moving rooms where people are like us, subdued, floating over cesspools where rats reign supreme and by forgotten subterranean lairs where bums sit together in filth and darkness, sharing cigarettes and trying to keep warm, or such is my mythology. I gave the Mariachis a dollar and got off the train at Broadway Lafayette. Then I watched the girl in the yellow polka dots watch me as the train slid away.

I got back on the F train at 14th Street, going uptown. Why did I ever get off? No reason in particular, but my metrocard is unlimited, so why the hell not? Besides, the F train is often full, perhaps because it traverses from the southernmost point of Brooklyn, Coney Island, tracing the numerical middle of Manhattan, 6th Avenue, to the outer reaches of Jamaica Queens. Moreover, a little promenade can be delectable in the city, you pass sleek sunglassed women with six shopping bags slipping through the crowds like wraiths, still men weeping in narcotic euphoria on the steps of the cathedral, women down and out who borrow babies for their day jobs as sedentary mendicants, bejeweled weed dealers with gold grills that pop out flashing dime bags from behind cement stoops and wrought-iron rails. What’s not to like? The train pulled up with gail force winds, just as I was descending the stairs. A little teenage Indian girl wrapped in neon saris was ascending the stairs with her mother, and she stopped to look back and watch me. Then, she turned, head down and followed her mother. Beep boop, the train doors shut and I swiped a seat between a sleeping Levantine man, on my left, berobed in galabiya with a white beard following his jawbone and a white embroidered skullcap enclosing the creases of his brow and an another man, on my right, this one occidental with shades and a newsboy hat. I started talking to the guy in the shades and learned that he was a jazz musician from Cuba, now playing in NYC for five years. He was going to play that night in the West Village and I promised myself that I’d be there (and I was). Just then, an old woman looked up from her Bible and started jabbering in Russian. I understood nothing at first, but as the cadence of her sentences started to roll along more smoothly, I realized she was quoting from the scriptures. The man in the skull cap awoke and was watching her intently, I remarked. Then, she changed languages and began speaking English. She was clearly distraught and tears hovered at the edges of her speech, when she mentioned her daughter. Oh, my daughter! She unintentionally reminded herself, seemingly wounded by the words themselves. My daughter was kind, never a bad word was spoken of her! And she started sobbing, calling out to the pasajeros ensimismados for sympathy, in vain. I instinctively got up and went over to her.

My daughter killed herself, oh why!? Everyone loved her, why did she do this to us, to herself?” I could only look at her, there was nothing I could say. She continued in a quivering voice, Now our family is being threatened by the Russian mob. We are poor, what do they want with us? Again, I was tongue-tied. She went on, I understand that not everyone can be rich, but so many people, they live like slaves, like SLAVES!” When I looked up, I realized I had missed my stop, and I turned to her, saying, It’s not all bad m’am, there are good people out there. Don’t lose hope.” And with that flimsy consolation, I left the bereaved woman. As a walked past the old man in the skull cap, his eyes sparkled. Beep boop, the doors closed.

I was taking the dark gumspotted stairs of 34th Street two at a time, and as I exited the stairwell I nearly collided with squat man in a pin-striped suit. He wore a fedora with greying steelwool hair poking out from under it. He looked at me and I looked at him. Then, he burst into a narrative of his day in fast-forward, I came up from Washington on the bus to Penn Station and I was like… and he started shuffling in place, super fast, sweeping his feet back and forth like a moonwalker. His fancy footwork was awe-inspiring, and he didn’t stop fasting talking about his day, frantic to tell the story. He was putting on a show for me, but did that mean he would ask me for money afterwards? He was carrying a little leather doctor’s bag and couldn’t have looked more anachronistic, like an stooped icon of the roaring twenties. Now, he was shouting greetings at me in Italian, which I heartily answered, in Italian. Buona giornata! Oh, grazie signore. Prego! Buona serata anche! Altrettanto! We smiled ear to ear and wished each other well, neither of us knowing what had just happened, but both infused anew with the atomic collision energy of the city.

I got back into the subway at 52nd Street, beside, underneath the silver, slant-topped Citigroup building, to await the 6 train with a French novel in my hand. Actually, it was from a Spanish writer, Lucía Extebarría, but the copy was in French. Those of you who know me know that I am not averse to drawing the attention of fly girls with such props, but this time however, I was really into the book. So, there I was, my eyes greedily assaulting the lines of smooth sounds, loving their grace and elegance, when I felt the breeze of the arriving 6 train against my cheeks. Then, I heard a noise, and, turning my head, I beheld a man, presumably an ordinary shmoe or bum, if you prefer, who had just fallen off the platform and into the train’s path. I assumed he was drunk or extremely high, because he was sitting on his ass in the mud, in the middle of the tracks, reaching over slow as molasses to gather some papers that went down into the muddy vermin pit with him. When I turned back to the train, the first and second cars of it had already slithered into the tunnel and it was fast approaching the reclining, scraggly, drunken curmudgeon. I took to my heels, along with another onlooker, and, without a moment’s hesitation, I jumped off the platform. Maybe it was the adrenaline, but the bum was really light; I fairly hoisted him up onto the platform, where the other man was waiting to pull him up. Then, I hopped out of the grimy cesspool myself, and all three of us strode like into the train, which had pulled right up to us in the ten seconds the whole episode had spanned.

In the squeaky clean, air-conditioned 6 train, my fellow and I came to ourselves, looking at each other, and then at the bum, who now began yelling, You saved my life, you saved my life. We sat down, feeling like new hires at Goldman Sachs settling down to a first five course meal. Then, the bum began pacing nervously, with his torso bent dramatically forward, his aspect grave, his fists trembling. I looked back at the other guy, curiously. Then we both looked at the bum, who know resembled Groucho Marx, huffing, puffing, and stomping about. What’s he doing? He isn’t going to tell the story to the people in the train… Then, both our faces dropped, in disbelief. The man began lecturing everybody, in slurred speech, about Jesus Christ. He was waving his fists and saying something about the way the truth and the light, but I can’t be sure, because I have an advanced Christian message deflector system, which I developed after my radicalized Protestant upbringing. My radar deflector works on word combinations to identify and isolate proponents of Christianity. For instance, if a person says anything about the ‘end times’, being ‘born again’, or any other similar combination of archaic terms, I immediately tune that shit completely out. As such, I didn’t hear anything the bum said after the first reference to the soul-saving power of the gospel. Christians preach mercy and compassion. When it comes to hypocrisy, I am not about mercy or compassion, so I heckled him. And so is one of life’s great ironies: the person saving your life in one moment may be heckling you the next.

I was walking along the subway platform in 14th St., beside a stopped N train, when I came upon two men. I stopped between them, because one of them asked me to help him get to the train. He was in a pitiful state. The train doors were open, and he was slowly summoning the force to walk five steps. I put out my hand, wincing in horror at the sight of his left foot- swollen, bulging out of the brace, infected and suppurating. He took my hand and made his first step, swaying then back in agony. He looked at the ground, fully lucid, determined, coherent. This man was in full possession of his faculties, and I wondered how he had gotten into such a desperate situation. As I examined the man, I realized that he had been paralyzed on the bench, perhaps for days, in despair and excrement. You need to see a doctor, I said uselessly, stating the all too apparent. He didn’t respond. He took another step, and then another, bringing him within three feet of the open train door. A dapper young gentleman was holding the train doors open, holding a suitcase on wheels, obviously that of the derelict man, upright. I looked into the good Samaritan’s face and he looked into mine, Don’t I know you? Yeah, you were at Jim’s party. Yes, I remember you, Alex right? How are you? As if it were totally normal, with this shadow of a man on my arm, his stench making my eyes water. The people on the train didn’t protest or yell, neither did the conductor, the world seemed to wait for this broken and hopeless man to board the train. Can you get my jacket? I turned around, his jacket was on the floor, sodden with rank and unidentifiable substances that ran towards the edge of the platform in two streams. I picked up the jacket fastidiously and draped it over his roller suitcase, which Alex had been holding as he held open the doors. You are a good man… to do this, I said. And the doors closed. Beep boop.

I was examining the bench where the man had been sitting, when the smell hit me, and I reeled back and began coughing. Perhaps this happened all too easily. The division of responsibility in the New York multitude is as cruel and indifferent as the sea to a castaway in Magellan’s Straits, like it was for the woman who was pursued by a killer as she ran down East 62nd Street and whose screams were heard by no less than 38 people, none of whom called the police. Perhaps he called out to Alex or Alex offered to help him, finally ending that stage of his helplessness. I do not know what became of him afterwards, because I haven’t been able to locate Alex.

I told my friends about it over dinner in the UWS, and was again back in the subway, passing through the revolving door turnstile, when a portly man in a tshirt and basketball shorts grabbed my Ukranian friend by her long flaxen hair and, brandishing a broken bottle, demanded of my stalky Jersey-born Italian American friend Chris, his wallet. The man was drunk however, and he tripped and then was pushed by Chris, pulling the girl by her hair to the ground and smashing his bottle in the process. All this happened while my back was turned. Nadja, the bandit, and a smashed bottle were on the ground when I turned around. The stranger was cowering below as Chris yelled, What was that, look at you now! You piece of shit! Nadja got up and ran to me, thrusting her wallet through the bars and attempting to push her whole black horse hair purse through, which didn’t work. Chris turned to her, and away from the bandit, who retreated up the stairs. A young MTA worker opened the emergency door for Nadja, who promptly broke into tears and sat forlornly on the cement, frenetically moving her hands about her body and hair, violated, asking herself, vat if I hyad been alone, I am hyere at night alvays. Chris ran up the stairs, after Nadja’s assailant, who escaped. Then, they went with the MTA employee to file a report with the police, and I road the train alone, horrified and demoralized by the violence, poverty, and desperation I saw around me, and unable to resolve my conflicts with this society.

I’m in Colombia, ten years, four languages and many solitary voyages after my first solo trip when I was 17. My bus has left Cartagena, city of sin, bound for Bogotá, city of smog. I haven’t slept for a while. And I have three grams of cocaine left from the seven my friends and I bought for fifteen bucks from a squat speed-freak of a man who ran around our table in a rooftop steakhouse in Santa Marta, giving all of us five and calling us brother. He showed up on a moped after our Colombian friends asked the six and a half foot tall cook if he knew where we could score some weed. That steakhouse is the best I’ve ever been to, for the money; you eat in the open air and a long lean steak with potatoes and salad is 2.50 US$. Fuck yeah, brother.

That night, Saturday night, our bus creeps through the crowded main street of a village, we, behind glass windows trapped, hear garbled music and stare out at the lights, the rustling of bodies, and the flashing of eyes made heavy and carnal with eye-shadow. The bus lurks on. There is an entire soccer team of seventeen-year-olds with their hair hi-lighted, gelled, and spiked, who are constantly swearing and gawking at the girls on the street. I repeatedly trouble the wrinkly white-haired man with the trucker hat next to me, to go to the tiny bathroom, where I stab a key into a minuscule plastic bag full of white powder which I greedily inhale through my nostrils and smear upon my gums. Get it. I come back to my seat, climbing over the old man. He remarks from time to time on the village we are passing, and how he used to know a girl there many years ago. His Spanish sounds like my grandpa’s English: country-style, rural, farmy. I look down at his hands, just like my grandpa’s, huge and calloused with big clumsy fingers like the Hulk. My mind soars on cocaine wings…

My grandfather’s old house is a stately mansion on County Farm Road outside of Salem, Illinois. It is the symbolic ancestral domain in whose rooms and corridors my dreaming mind strolls nightly. It is my only home, although I have lived in so many others and another family now makes it their’s. Beside the mansion are silos of corrugated steel full of corn in which we used to play (me and my cousins), the big yellow shed full of farm equipment, Mack trucks, John Deere tractors and combines we used to climb on and later drove, and barns and garages fragrant of hay, grease, and rotting corn and full of the shiny four-door Cadillac’s my grandpa collected. And my grandpa is out front, dutiful as ever, in the sun, in his unfashionably short shorts, mowing the lawn on his yellow Cub Cadet riding mower, on which he had a custom-installed cup holder, so he could drink Busch beer (only the best). Inside the great decaying barn, where paint peels off the walls and sparrows nest in the rafters, are the work trucks I taught myself to drive way before I had a license. Well, now they are long gone, and so are my grandparents.

Back in Colombia, it’s the middle of the night and the bus has broken down. We all file out while the drivers bang around on the engine in the back. Then, the entire soccer team and I line up behind the bus and try to push start it, without success. Everybody lounges around and sits on the curb, while I sneak off to do some bumps in the darkness. My mind wanders as I walk…

I sat six years old on the shoulder of the interstate outside of the puny town of Conway, Arkansas, as my dad worked on the engine of the mauve motorhome with the baby-blue stripe, which we had bought after selling the the land my grandpa had given us in Illinois. We had no bills, pretty much; no car payments, no house payment, no phone bill, and no credit cards. All we needed was gas and food, and another church at which to preach and perform faith-healings. My dad had just preached at the Pentecostal Church in Conway, and we had been treated very hospitably; everybody wanted to know us, the visiting preacher and his wife and kid, and all the girls, of course, wanted to know me. Now, we were on the side of the road, surrounded by silent pines, as my dad fiddled with the back engine, which powered the lights and AC. Dad had been trying to start the back engine, just to get the AC running, but, in the process, the front battery died. This was unintended, and ominous. Things were tense, if we didn’t get any juice from the battery on the next try, we’d have to wait for a jump, or maybe we’d have to replace it, which would deplete half the money my dad had just been paid by the Conway Pentecostals.

So my parents and I prayed. We bowed our heads in supplication to almighty god that the ignition of our mauve motorhome with the baby-blue stripe would turn over. And it worked, that time. The engine started, and, although we still didn’t have AC, we thanked the Lord magnanimously. I can see myself seated afterward, in a scene I often imagined in the years following, as I sat in the plush passenger-side Captain chair, which had armchairs and rotated, with my feet on the dash as the pines blurred past, and I felt the rush of the road again as if for the first time.

The old man is asleep beside me and the gray light of dawn begrudgingly reveals the Colombian countryside. Hours pass and I doze off intermittently as we skirt tall mountains, high above a little village to which the old man points, remarking in his hillbilly Spanish how much it has grown, and how there is no wind down there, so very far into that valley where the village sits, which will soon be boiling in the heat of the day.

The old trucker-hatted hillbilly Colombian man dozes off, and I sneak out my bag of yay, tired of bothering him to pass by to the stench and the relentless, lurching violence of the bus’s itty bitty bathroom. I carefully untie my prized little baggy, readying my key to swan dive into its contents, and I look over to see that the man is suddenly awake, looking straight ahead. Did he see it? Damn. I close my fingers around the bag, not knowing, paranoid, and I open my book, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, reading distractedly, casting suspicious glances every so often at my neighbor. Calvino writes, “Futures not achieved are only branches of the past, dead branches.” How many memories of lost or unrequited loves do I hold on to… So many…

Our Colombian bus driver slips in a DVD, what will it be; there’s no telling in Latin America. This time, it’s a DVD full of music videos from the Mariachi legend, Vicente Fernandez, which is like having a prayer answered that I never could have conceived of in my wildest psychedelic visions, because I fucking love Mariachi music, and it never crossed my mind that this Mariachi legend (may god preserve him) made music videos. Two weeks ago I sang a Vicente Fernandez song with a nine-piece Mariachi band in front of (at least) one-hundred Colombians in pin-striped suits and silk dresses at a wedding reception in Cucutá. The setting was espectacular, an old-style hacienda with a cobblestone plaza filled with tables all candelabras and floral arrangements surrounding an elegant stone fountain. Next to the plaza there was an open-air pavilion where three totally different bands played, first Mariachi, then Salsa, then Vallenato, which is like Colombian folk music. The mansion was built by a cocaine dealer, but it is now rented out for parties such as this one, the wedding of two Colombians with wealthy families. I was with my half Colombian-half Gringo friend, Manuel, and we’d spent the days preceding the wedding getting high a lot, getting 10$ massages, and lounging in the pool in the local country club where we were continually stared at by rich teenage girls and their moms.

Funny story, we were rolling five deep down the road in Manuel’s cousin’s car, smoking a gigantic joint and laughing without a care in the world as smoke clouded the windows like a Cheech and Chong movie, when we spied a military police checkpoint just ahead. Dios Mio! We had just sped around a bus, and Guillermo almost stopped in terror, with the bumper of the bus filling up the back window and its honk filling our ears. We were instantly all sobriety and seriousness, gasping for breath with the same sinking feeling in the pit of our stomachs, as the bus tail-gated us. Guillermo stubbed the joint in the ashtray and we all prepared for the absolute worst. We must have all looked super relaxed, because we were so stoned and despondent, sure that we were busted. If we rolled down the window, the game was up. However, the military police waved us by without ceremony, machine guns slung casually over the shoulder. Four seconds passed the checkpoint, it was a party on wheels again, and we laughed as if there weren’t any danger and did shotguns.

The night of the wedding was extravagant. I wore a navy-blue pin-striped suit that I’d bought in Bogotá and shoes with holes in them that I’d bought in Budapest. I had already told Manuel’s uncle and the father of the bride of my absurd passion for Los Mariachis, and they both insisted that I sing. I had never sung in front of an audience, but I instantly agreed nevertheless. Ten minutes before I was supposed to sing, I imbibed a big glass of Chivas Regal on the rocks, but I wasn’t particularly nervous. Five minutes before I was set to sing, the band played a song which reminded the bride’s family of their deceased daughter. No one in the family seemed able to bear even an instant of thinking about her tragic death without paroxysmal sadness, and so it was when they heard that song. The entire crowd of wedding guests watched, powerless, as the father, mother, and two remaining daughters sobbed with abandon. Everybody had known this girl, who was also Manuel’s ex-girlfriend, and had watched her grow up. Then, the father of the bride made a helpless and exasperated gesture to the Mariachi’s, who abruptly stopped playing, which shattered the mood of festivity. It was the perfect moment for something completely absurd, like a Gringo singing a Mariachi song, to divert all attention from the great sorrow which had momentarily taken control. So the singer put the mic to his lips and introduced me, in Spanish, with his husky bedroom voice…

“Ahora es mi placer de presentarles al Gringo que va a cantar El Mariachi.”

I sauntered up and took the mic, without saying a word. The guests gathered around, and we stared at each other, as the opening notes were struck on various guitars and brass instruments. I didn’t know when to start and looked back at the band, in their full Mariachi regalia, all baby blue, sombreros, bolo ties, and nut-hugging polyester pants. The trumpets were singing and musicians nodded to me anxiously, canta! Canta! And I began…

“Tienes las llaves de mi alma,

Puedes entrar en la hora que tú quieras,

Para que veas si haya en el mundo

Que puede darte lo que yo quisiera.¹”

It all came out perfectly, I sang in a deep voice so that I wouldn’t find the higher notes out of my range, which is, I think, what the Mariachi’s do as well. It’s quite easy to sound good like that, or maybe I’m a natural. In any case, the crowd seemed quite taken aback, and more people joined the quiet multitude, all eyes on me. Manuel was laughing uncontrollably.

Tu boca tus ojos y tu pelo

Los llevo en mi mente noche y día

No me pides que deje de quererte

Después que te entregué la vida mia.²

I forgot the entire second verse and enlisted the help of the singer. At some point, a black sombrero appeared on my head, as if the Mariachi gods had smiled upon my offering. I sang the last chorus on my own, adding dramatic fist-waving and a drawn-out, deep finish that came straight from the depths of my soul. The wedding guests didn’t stop to cheer, clap, and jump up and down during the last minute of my performance, and the families of the bride and groom rushed to me in unison when the song was finished, calling all cameras. While I was posing for pictures with a massive shit-eating grin on my face and being told repeatedly how divine was my song, the Mariachi band slowly packed up their stuff and walked out. It almost seemed as if they were dejected, but I doubt it. Manuel told me, “Dude, no one in my family is ever going to forget what you just did!” Indeed, no one in the family was going forget anything anyone did, because they were all sitting there watchful and surveillant over every single move anybody made on the dance floor. I was able to sneak off to make out with Manuel’s cousin, however, without being detected. Everyone in the family still calls me El Mariachi.

I thanked the Mariachi gods after every music video of Vicente Fernandez back on the bus. They were superb. I was literally choked with delight by the images of women stroking agave plants, by the profile of Vicente entering a dark cathedral to confess his salacious conquests to a visibly entertained priest, by Vicente in short shorts (like my grandpa) atop a Volkswagen Beetle scrubbing and sweating into his mustache and hefty eyebrows, by Vicente singing to a girl with her eyelashes aflutter and her boyfriend brooding beside, by Vicente, looking magnificent as always in full gleaming Mariachi regalia, seated upon a dancing horse. “Vicente, Vicente, Vicente!” the teenage soccer team kept shouting in unison. They were not at all pleased with this choice of DVD’s. They yelled at the bus driver without ceasing (which, I can tell you, does no good) and cheered with sarcastic scorn. When the videos ended, to my great dismay, I let myself slip into a strung-out sleep, satisfied and smiling over the images of Vicente, my hero, the almighty Mariachi Mujeriego³.

Mariachi may seem cheesy to you, and rightly so, because of the mustaches, the tight pants, the artless lyrics, sombreros and such, but Mariachi, well, you see, it’s the bomb, and those very characteristics are what makes it so. When the parade of Mariachi’s passed by me in Guadalajara, Mexico, entire orchestras of them on floats and dancing horses with confetti raining down, something inside me changed. It was like being baptized. Mariachi is the great heart of Mexico. It is the voice of the pueblo, the people, the little man, who will never be rich, whose dreams must be modest because fate, underdevelopment, and corruption have conspired against him. The singers often sob while they sing, I sob while they sing, everybody does, because El Mariachi’s message is universal. Every new woman, for Vicente, is an angel, then she cheats on him or leaves him, and he pines and is paralyzed by woe, drinking tequila, firing his gun at the moon, and kickin’ it in bars where women aren’t allowed, until he finds a new girl and the cycle begins anew. Obviously, every relationship begun with such unrealistic expectations is destined to fail miserably. It’s a disaster, but that’s why Mariachi music is so powerful. The Mariachi dares to hope for the impossible, then he relentlessly denounces and slanders and wallows in self-pity, when she doesn’t measure up. They bring everybody together, at the bottom of the barrel. I’m listening to Vicente right now, for inspiration.

Once in Bogotá, I sought asylum from every harsh aspect of the city in the airport, my crash-pad away from crash-pads. Before realizing that I had been sitting on his glasses for twenty minutes, I had a serious and sincere conversation in Spanish with the taxi driver. Before leaving my bag of cocaína and another of weed under a rock in the park by the airport, I smoked a huge spliff and did a rail. Before falling off to sleep across three chiropractically supported airport chairs, I was stared at by all the giggling and precocious Colombianas who were finishing work inside the airport. Then, before my first class flight in the morning, I awoke to discover my battered red backpack was gone, but it was just a little prank played on me for the amusement of the surprisingly jocular military police.

Sholeh spent the first half of her life in Tehran, Iran, and a good part of the second in Portland, Oregon. She told me, “I didn’t feel like I had a home for most of my life. I’m an immigrant, what is home for an immigrant? But, when I moved to New York City, I finally felt at home.” She described the dynamic atmosphere in Iran during the revolution, during which people were questioning everything openly, the existence of god, the need for women to wear the veil, etc. During this exciting period, she was influenced by the social realists of Mexico, like Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Jose Orozco. She fled the country with her two-year-old daughter after the war started with Iraq. Bombs were exploding everywhere; just to go to the store, pushing a stroller, was terrifying. She said she felt totally paralyzed, desperate, and fearful of everything. The airports were closed, so she took a bus to Turkey and sat at the border for eleven hours, just to see if she could get out. And she did.

After arriving in the Portland, where some of her family members lived, she had a recurring nightmare in which she would be walking down the street and her clothes would start to fall off her body. In the dream, she desperately struggled to keep her clothes from falling off and awoke in a panic. If that took place in Iran, she would have been arrested and possibly banished, or stoned to death on the spot, and her dreaming mind was still in Iran. She has not returned to Iran since she left, over twenty years ago, because, she admitted, “I was bitter for many years, and I didn’t want to risk bringing my daughter there, because some relative could try to keep her there. But now my daughter is grown and I do want to go back.”

Sholeh says that her painting is half about the palate, the pigments, the shapes and images, and the other half is about her experience as a woman from Iran. She went through a transformative period after coming to the US during which she was painting on ten wooden doors. Up until that point, she was committed to becoming a figurative artist. In the project with the doors, her perspective slowly evolved from painting a female figure in a landscape, coming closer and closer to that figure, until she became the figure herself and was no longer depicting the experience of another.

“When I was in grad school in Oregon, I thought of my own experience and my body executing the work, and the person, the icon became myself, and the act of painting became a very vibrant and even erotic experience. That feeling of eroticism and the ritual of moving my wrists and my arms in this way, if I did that in the society of Iran, in the middle of a square, standing, without being covered and defying the traditional expectation that a woman should keep her posture submissive, the very process, as an Iranian, is very significant and reconstructive, in terms of the traditional experience of being a woman. From then on, I wasn’t worried about what my work was going to look like, or what story I was trying to tell. For me, it is more realistic, in a way, and not related to abstract expressionism.”

In her development as a painter, she has gone from poetic realism, to gesture expressionism, to a style she describes as, “synaestheticism”, by which she means, painting “inspirited and sublimated” by music. She first experienced synaestheticism in a mural painting she had been commissioned to do for a public building in Portland. She was painting while a jazz drummer played in an improvisational dialogue, which took place between them in sounds and gestures. She said that she could feel the sound traveling through her body, putting her into a trance on a very high level and took her experience of painting to an amazing and different place. Over time, through listening to jazz, traveling, and letting the act of painting facilitate the conversation between head and heart, her style became founded in improvisation.

Now, her painting has evolved further, the spontaneity and improvisation have given way to rationality and design, in a layered and geometric style with which she tries to express very subtle poetic ideas that flit away from the conscious mind as she walks, as we walk, the streets of New York, bumping into hundreds of people and seeing just as many signs and advertisements. One can feel this frenzy in her paintings, where “rectangular-shaped units drenched in bright complimentary colors and interspersed throughout the canvas correspond each with the others, in a dense, dialectically-formed cornucopia of color and shape, bringing to mind the structure of a musical composition.” This design, she says, takes great inspiration from the ancient arts of Persia, especially miniature-painting, carpet-making, and architecture. The inspiration she takes from these arts find expression in her work through, “the liberal use of the geometric form, rich, vibrant colors, and above all, a deep sense of spirituality and inner peace.” And she continues, “The shallow picture plane invites the eye to survey the multitudinous colors and shapes as a part of a much larger universe that extends far beyond the canvas.” Truly, Sholeh conjures her notes and her brush-strokes from a rich and vibrant universe that deserves to be expressed.

Well, I can tell you, I feel positively infused with the spirit of Calvino’s genius. I want to live in the trees and I’m even in love with his horn-weilding blond Italian princess (it helps that I know one like her). I know what you are saying to yourself, you says, says will Tim always be such a flaneur? Let us hope not. Elsewise, I’ll prolly die next time I go amok with the beauty and sex of Spring and climb a tree all ablaze with foliagé and fertility.

I mean, like, to return to my original narrative, I landed on my feet, narrowly missing an adamant trunk and a bunch of hardass roots that would’ve certainly broke my bare feet. My left ankle was all swollen and right is still a bit a bummy and stiff-toed. Wish I had been wearing mah steel toed boots, yup… I was swaggering hallified gangster lean for a bit there, and, on the streets of Harlem, a few fellow pedestrians didn’t know how to take it, judging by their comments on the order of, that boy so fucked up he cain’t even wawk, and that boy’s momma need a teach’em how ta wawk. Now I just do a little mosey with occasional stutter-steps. I feel nostalgic for the gangster lean though, I think I might continue with that. I could just keep telling the tree story, although with the caveat of Italo Calvino’s engenius writing so’s that it don’t seem like my momma raised a fool.
If y’all read that book, you’d prolly end up in a similar predicament. I says, steer clear of Italo Calvino! Shit, I mean, he was part of the reason I ended up in love with that benedetta Italian heartbreaker in the first place. Goddamn you Calvino! But I still love you. May you be reviled by History! May darkness consume you! But I’ll never tire of you. May your seed perish on the cold dead Earth! But I’ll always have your name on my lips, frequently while panting. The Benedetta spied your name on the cover of a tome which I pretended to read while peering over the aforementioned cover jealously devouring her tanned body and blond hair and Italian elegance. Now, years later, I haven’t succeeded in ridding myself of thoughts of her, of our conversations, of the way she shouted, non sei normale and non mi capisci. Chimera! Calvino, eh, can I call you Italo? Would that it was every man’s goal, says I with my hat in my hand. You succeeded in making your futile, brutish, and short attempt in this world have an enduring meaning. Calvino, do you know people all over the world get laid by the mere mention of your name, often only in a whisper, especially regarding the brilliance of I Numeri nella Oscurità, which I was pretending to read when the Benedetta started sizing me up as a prospective mate and husband?
I heard a cracking noise, and everyone within one hundred yards, I reckon, turned their heads instantly. Then I came down in terminal velocity, with a cloud of petals enveloping me, in my hair, pockets. Not a sound was uttered, except for the boisterous laughter of a good-natured British guy who later came up to discover if I was alright. Anthony (my roommate and comrade) was in the adjacent cherry tree, which was also all ablaze with the pink taco fecundity of Spring in the hills of Central Park. He came walking up about the time the first perturbed onlookers did. They were two twenty something girls, pretty easy on the eyes, but I could do no more than remark that fact, seeing as I was kind of embroiled in shock, pain, and chagrin. The one girl was like are you alright, and I was like, between shocked gasps for breath, I think so. Then she said, suddenly sultry, she can kiss it and make it better, but I was unable to reply. I was damn near paralyzed by shock, and Anthony stood over me, with his hands in his pockets, trumpeting his voice to the four winds, he’s alright, he’s just embarrassed, JUST EMBARRASSED, yeah, he’s just too embarrassed to talk, not to worry. I later managed to get on my feet, and the girls were sort of lingering in the valley, looking up at me, but i was still too shaken up and embarrassed to gesture for them to come over. I hobbled about, exalting my woes and sometimes using Anthony as a crutch, to the Metropolitan Museum, because Anthony had to see the Gustav Courbet show.
The moral of the story is that, well, I don’t give a fuck, live large, take risks, get out here and headbutt the sky. Calvino will be there watching, make him proud, make him a part of you, he is still around, as an onlooker and benedicting spirit, chuckling at our pining and our folly.