Egyptian Odyssey

I learned basic Arabic with a creepy Egyptian teacher I snagged on craigslist for 15 US$ an hour. He was living the life of a demi-pasha, or, maybe, his own version of the Muslim afterlife, in Brooklyn, giving free rent in exchange for unspecified sexual favors to numerous young immigrant girls he found on CL. He also worked for the homeland security agency and tutored military and gov’t officials, ivy league students and scholars, charging three or four times what I was paying, as his star pupil and confidante. He introduced me to the perverse and counterintuitive idiosyncrasies of Egyptian society and a variety of colloquial Egyptian phrases, which are direct, easily memorized, and handy in almost any situation. The language, however, is by no means easy to pronounce with the typical cadence or understand when the Egyptians start conjugating verbs and tagging pronouns on with suffixes and prefixes you can barely hear and damn near never imitate.

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.

Subway Stories

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 Dream To Be a Mariachi Singer

We are passing the shanty towns of the Cienéga, some half sunken in water. People in worn out t-shirts and cut-off jeans amble about the sandy streets lined with scrap-metal and plywood huts, on top of which corrugated steel roofs are held down with cement blocks, tied with string and wired with clothes hangers against the coastal winds. Half buried tires painted pastel colors mark the boundaries of yards, and awnings composed of palm fronds shield sinking porches from the sun. Puddles, which are full of garbage and the color of Pepto-Bismol, stagnate a little ways from the houses. A girl blows a kiss to me as the bus passes.

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…

Sholeh Dalai

Our first meeting took place at a Brazilian feijoada at Laura’s in Chelsea. A Flamenco guitarist’s nimble fingers plucked at his nylon strings and we all reclined about in the shadows, as if in an opium den. Suddenly, a piercing cry broke my repast and I looked up to see an imposing figure with high heeled black boots and tightly-curled dark maroon hair. She was singing in an unrecognizable language, which I learned from the others was Farsi. There was tenderness in her voice at first, but it became shrill and startling as she expressed loneliness and heartbreak in universal and intuitively understood tones, the tones of agony. She and the guitarist blended elements from the middle-east, Spain, and the Blues, when she started scatting. I’d never heard the like. This is Sholeh, and singing is only one of her hobbies; she’s actually a painter.

As a Child in the Woods

I had a dream lastnight, a beautiful nightmare. I was a child in the woods with all the wonder and mystery they hold. Esoteric powers, ineffable and faceless forces, terror, awe, and sublime violence all seem to lurk invisible in the woods, when you’re a child. The dream contained images I intuitively recognized, whether landscapes or dreamscapes, they seemed so familiar, it was taken for granted that I had known them long ago. Upon waking a forgot them, only the feeling of familiarity and fear remained, the fear of the unknown and the elemental. I always expected for some supernatural or monstrous being to come barreling out from behind a tree or from the shallow depths of a creek, in the woods, it seemed all too peaceful and silent, in the woods.

Upon awaking, I felt most deeply the contrast between my consciousness as a child and as an adult. Now, the mysteries that transfix my thoughts are private parties, power play, virtual financial coups, and orgies in unassuming buildings in manhattan and all the pairs of eyes that, I imagine, are watching the subway trains go by from the darkness inside the tunnels. I wake up and think about money and clients and the office. Not the windigo or the ghost of the weeping mother by crybaby bridge or the blood sacrifices of satanic rites- the kinds of things that a child imagines to exist in the woods, just as soon as you turn your back. It’s too bad really.

Two Week Thunderstorm

These are a few of my favorite things… Mississippi mudpies, the Piggly Wiggly, a mounted 400 year old loggerhead snapping turtle in a shotgun roadside coonass convenience store, the legendary Achafalaya river undertow, muddy bayou fishing with the line tied to my toe as i kick back against a tree, “camps” on stilts by swift rivers prone to deluge, catfish poboys, crawfish etouffée, writhing live oak trees, roaches with wings, junebugs, lightning bugs, bug-zappers, racoon-skin hats, Ouiski Chitto canoe trips, the Natchez Trace, scenic byways that leave the highways and curve around 100 times (a hundred indecisions, And a hundred visions and revisions) and 100 corresponding mansions with wraparound porches and swings only to rejoin the highway again one mile up the road. Towns with more fish markets than anything else, armadillos, possums, water moccasins, bathtub gin, zydeco, dank misty mornings that mature into scintillating, heavily heated mirages by high noon, neutra rats, bobcats left to rot on the side of the road, compound bows, lynchin’, old time relgion, gossipy church people, hot damn, go-carts, and little trucks that billow noxious gas to kill hoards of god forsaken mosquitos.
It sure gives me the dickens when ah start to muse on these things.

I fell out of a cherry tree.

I fell out of a cherry tree. I heard a cracking noise, and everyone within one hundred yards turned their heads to see me plummet to the ground. I didn’t really have time to move, but I sorta recollect having reached skyward with my hands. What buffoonery, I know. In my defense, however, I feel obliged to mention that I’ve been reading Italo Calvino and it was because of him that I fell. His first novel is about Cosimo who, at the age of twelve, chooses to live out the rest of his days in the trees, spurning his father’s entreaties that he accept his rank and title of Baron, along with its manifold responsibilities. There’s a bold and uncompromising spirit for you! The story is extolled by the younger brother, who watches, wistfully, silently envious, as his brother pursues various crafts and adventures, including but not limited to stealing fruit, battling a ferocious wildcat, learning to hunt with a dachsund on the ground to retrieve his kills, studying Latin, reading classics, courting a high class foxy blond who rides a pony and tries to enslave him, running with brigands and providing them with reading material (after which they eventually cease to rob and pilfer from the villagers), spying on beturbaned Turkish pirates hiding their booty, sleeping in hammocks, making clothes with animal pelts, planning an aquaduct, and a lot of other shit too, and I ain’t even finish the book yut!

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.