ladies of the....er, day; mexican celebrity; and reminders of the war in lebanon

It was yesterday and I had just left the internet cafe after realizing that I didn't want to JUST write about my hospitable experience, when about 50 feet down the street this happened:


“Everybody in this fucking country is liars!” spat the dye-job blonde girl, in a sweet, yet rough European accent, accompanied by her less talkative, sad-eyed friend, brown roots showing about a month’s worth of growth on the pair’s pony tailed scalps. “I ask the people where the grocery store is and they say, ‘that way’ or ‘this way,’ just pointing, but we don’t find it.”

They stopped on the sidewalk, waiting for me to catch up. “The co-op is just on my way home, I’ll walk you past,” I said. And at that, the more talkative of the two linked her arm with mine, like two halves of friendship pendants manufactured in separate factories by different companies that somehow fit, inviting no more stares than when I dress in baggy camouflage shorts and a print t-shirt revealing a half sleeve tattoo . . . okay, maybe a bit more. The eastern european prostitutes and I walking arm-in-arm to the grocery store, now there’s a postcard for mom.

As we scuttled across the street the one with the gusto asked, “Are you Lebanese?” I told her that I wasn’t, in fact Mexican-American. She looked up at me with eyebrows also dyed blonde, striking an arch, “I like Mexico! …..what the fuck are you doing in this country?” The second time today that I’ve been told how great the nation-state I’ve never known is, by people who’ve never been there. I guess they only hear “Mexican” and not the whole “Mexican-American,” thinking of “America” as a continent, perhaps two, and not as a country like most people from the United States have the tendency to do. Turns out they were from Romania. I would’ve guessed the Ukraine, thinking back to a disagreement Marina and I had about the statistic we had seen about the number of people exported from there and the percentage of them who became sex-workers.

The brown Lebanese boys at the co-op grocery, sitting on scooters, averted their eyes as I pointed in their direction up at the dingy white sign (caught in an obvious drawn out stare directed at the ladies of pleasure and I), red letters spelling out “coop” making me wonder about the conditions that these girls were brought here in. Sold by their mothers on the streets of Romania like the BBC special I saw the week we arrived? Kidnapped and transported in cages or coops, like the jails in the Phillipines? We unhooked and the quiet one looked back at me, probably not having understood a word of what her friend and I had said to each other, and offered, “shukran,” in Arabic meaning “thank you,” her tired face no more than 15 years old.




There are heartbreakers, and there are the heartbreakers from the pop songs and blues music that we all know, kinda’ like the way I felt when I visited the doctor earlier in the day to conduct some health tests. A nice gentleman who spoke very good English was telling me to “breathe deeply” as he inserted his needle into my vein. I relaxed, the plunger filling his vial as a beautiful Lebanese nurse asked me what kind of name “Miguel” is. As soon as she realized that I wasn’t Lebanese, she left the room and returned with two more fairly stunning hospital attendants, as they asked me questions like, “is that tattoo fake?” and, “do most Mexicans have such nice tattoos?” The guy removing my blood for testing finally throwing in, “a professional obviously did this work,” referring to my arm like the others. After weeks, nay of a life, in practical obscurity, it was nice to feel like a celebrity for five minutes. I recommend it to you all.

As the original nurse bandaged up my arm she asked if I’ve been going out at all since I’ve been here, “yes,” I replied, “my girlfriend and I have been having a wonderful time.”




On a sidenote: Just before I got home to write all this, I brushed past a woman in hijab removing her lumped children from a cab at the top of the hill that descends to my apartment, putting them both into a wheelchair. By the time I was seated on our balcony and had begun to write, she had made her way down the street, yelling in a high pitched sing-song voice asking for donations. I wouldn't exactly say that people were beating each other down to give her money, but it was more than the usual case of the invisible beggers I'm used to seeing. Later I realized she had probably come down to our part of town, one of the wealthier, to get some dough for her children injured in the war, the reason why people didn't simply turn a blind eye to her as with what usually happens with the poverty sticken bedouins.

the global home, new jobs for pirates, and beirut chicken feet

It is necessary not to be "myself," still less to be "ourselves."
The city gives one the feeling of being at home.
We must take the feeling of being at home into exile.
We must be rooted in the absence of a place.

-Simone Weil




Walking beneath these Beirut buildings is like strolling through the mouth of an eccentric orthodontist, a picky fellow with big plans for each one of his teeth. He chose the decor for every individual bi-cuspid and incisor, eyeing them lazily in the mirror conjuring some sort of separate motif for the molars. Sometimes he finishes his work, other times half constructed dentures like temporary balconies sit side-by-side diamond studded braces rising up from the concrete sidewalks towering over the people in the taxi's and scooters and BMW's and Mercedes stirring the spit around, the inevitable invisible fauna that all cities have, as if looking at them from airplanes.

I made my first microscopic contribution to this rag-tag maw today. Woke up cold for the first time since we've been here, a single sheet, now an inadequate barrier between the elements and I, as well as the mosquitos. None-the-less, it got me going--sparking some sort of basic motivation in me. I was to meet Marina at AUB (American University of Beirut) like usual for lunch when from out of nowhere, maybe it was the bowel movement (it would become a theme of the day, the pasta we cooked last night with tap water resulting in something resembling chicken vindaloo), I lost the softest spot of my timidness when it comes to dealing with this city, the city that I've been trying to feel comfortable in once again. And for the record, let me say that it's not the plaque on the walls or the chicken foot I almost stepped on the other day that creates this disquiet, it's my dealings with people, it's always been my dealings with people, that's my problem, whether in the US or here. Sure, sometimes I'm spot on, other times fumbly bumbly, but the good interactions are harder and harder, and I take them harder, when I can't speak the language.

Point being, I found that occasional happiness that we all stumble upon from time-to-time among the brick-by-brick crumbling homes and architectually divine monoliths as I walked from Caracas, through the Hamra District and just as I passed a sign written in spray paint, a block from campus, which read "Music Store" with a mutually spray painted arrow pointing the way, that happiness transformed itself into a concrete business idea.

I entered the store, some sort of mantra about "not ever feeling at home anywhere so why should I be scared here?" ran through my head. It worked and my fear became courage as if my emotional battery is only positively and negatively charged, figure out how to flip it and I'm the opposite of the man you just saw.

Performing one of my personally celebrated setups, what most sane people like to call a "plan," I asked the man how much the cd's in his store cost. "8,000 lira," about 5 bucks. With mostly burned, yet current, mainstream hip-hop album covers staring back at me from the table, I took the next step, sure that he would say no, I asked him if he'd be interested in selling some "hip-hop mixtape cd's" that I'd made. Sure enough he denied me, so I thanked him, walked out of the store, went around the corner for a few minutes and headed back to his shop. Remembering that to make a joke, or sometimes smile in these precarious situations in Beirut leads to this disdain filled quietness on the part of the citizens, sometimes outright rudeness, so I remained stoic and offered that I bring him some "mixtape cd's" for free, and if they sold then we could work out some sort of deal afterwards for future cd's, as I have enough ammo for atleast 10 to 20 separate albums, maybe more now that I've been reunited with my 2 huge cases of music filled to the brim, living on the shelf in a friend's apartment through the war of this past summer. He agreed. Oh joyous day.

As I relished my new found love for this city and my place in it I began to have that feeling I had six months ago: at home when not at home, because there's really only been moments that I could call as such, or at most there have been specific rooms, not whole houses and certainly not entire cities. I thought about the book I've been reading, The Global Soul, Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home, by Pico Iyer, a little appropriate I guess. He talks about this world, and these new citizens like himself who he considers "Global Souls," without what the "normal" world would call a true home, born in India to two Indian parents from separate regions speaking different languages, raised in Los Angeles and schooled in England, now spending his time between suburban, if not rural Japan and LA, but travelling the world as a "sometimes journalist."

He writes: ..."I began to wonder whether a new kind of being might be coming to light--a citizen of this International Empire--made up of fusions (and confusions) we had not seen before: a "Global Soul" in a less exalted (and more intimate, more vexed) sense than the Emersonian one. This creature could be a person who had grown up in many cultures all at once--and so lived in the cracks between them--or might be one who, though rooted in background, lived and worked on a globe that propelled him from tropic to snowstorm in three hours. She might have a name that gave away nothing about her nationality (a name like Kim, say, or Maya, or Tara), and she might have a porous sense of self that changed with her location. Even the most ageless human rites--scattering his father's ashes, or meeting the woman who might be his wife--he might find himself performing six thousand miles from the place he now called home."

"The key to this global soul, for Emerson, lay entirely in perception: it was not so much that man had been exiled from the Garden as that he has ceased to notice that it was all around him. In that sense, our shrinking world gave more and more of us a chance to see, in palpable, unanswerable ways, how much we had in common, and how much we could live, in the grand Emersonian way, beyond petty allegiances and labels, outside the reach of nation-states.....Yet the chance to rise to this higher sense of kinship was shadowed by the fact that more and more of what we seemed to share was on the merest surface, and global unity was most often defined in terms of common markets and linked networks; sometimes it could seem that the main force carrying the 'Novus Ordo Seclorum' around the world--our new order of man--was the dollar bill (on which that noble motto is inscribed above the Masonic Seal)."

So, as you can imagine I was quite taken aback when I received a phone call. You are now reading the blog of a mexican-american living in Beirut, the proud tudor of 2 Korean kids, and perhaps their father, the businessman.

roommates, cypriots, culture as it relates to place, beirut and the world over

Oct. 5, 2006

I feel like I'm finally putting a dent in my image as the house dumb-ass, what with last night and all. It's funny, sometimes drinking brings out the smart guy in me. I know, some of you would like to see him more often, all cozied up with his own arms folded across one another, frown upon his face, saying things like "hmph," discussing the implications of race and identity on a global scale, sitting in the corner shelf of my brain. But he's shy and sometimes his ideas in my head find my mouth only to realize that my tongue lacks the scholastic vocabulary to explain such complex ideas. So I remain quiet, (for those of you who REALLY know me this must sound strange) contemplative and observant as my American football men push the line of scrimmage back and forth on the television (that's right, ESPN and FOX sports), inviting such questions from my pretentious/gay roommate like, "sooo…..you're a big football fan?" when his questions to other housemates usually revolve around puns and hyperboles relating to the Q'uran and Sir Isaac Newton's Theory of Gay Men Telling his Roommates that his Girlfriend Lives in France. I mean, France? That's the same country that all gay men use to hide their imaginary girlfriends. Sorry, that is mean.

Anyways, last night I took everyone for their poker money, Marina and I splitting the wealth pretty evenly. It couldn't have worked out any more perfect, except for the amount of Cranberry Finlandia I had to drink. It was BARF-tastic! The kinda' things paisley dreams of toilet water are made of.

After such winnings it was required of me to take all the losers out for more drinks. We went to a bar just around the way (by the way, a Norwegian place actually called By the Way) to meet our new roommate Sathari (Sat-hari), a white American Sikh girl, and the local favorite, a girl named Athena: half Cypriot, half Lebanese. What an unexpected interaction! We talked about this new world her and I live in, where culture seems so place specific, except in the case of refugees and diasporas, and how it all can look like such a flimsy tissue after seeing another one and it's internal workings, making all of it feel more like a game rather than centuries old tradition. The invention of flight has had far more implications than we could ever have dreamed of.

I consoled her on her disappointment that her old roommate's voice over the phone had seemed to change along with her move back to the Bay Area (our mutual friend Jolie, having moved here just before 9-11 and leaving during the big evacuation from the war this summer) reminding me of the moment when one of my Bay Area parent's commented on the accent of the man who gave us the tour of the Oakland A's Coliseum, asking him where he was from due to his intonations. To my ears he was obviously from the Bay, but I guess they haven't heard the ghetto white men speak in such ways, the ways they must speak so as to not be a target while living in the inner-city. Place, in this instance, not as porous as one might think.

three unrelated beirut stories: public shaming, anticlimactic bowel blog, and shoulder pads

Yes! I've been waiting for my first public shaming! I wondered how the men folk would take to me with this giant tattoo all over my arm, not well apparently. The stares seem to be more frequent, from both sexes, the ladies don't seem to mind it as much though, hey hey.
I heard someone talking to me in arabic from behind, spun around on the street and saw no one on the sidewalk. then I noticed the guy who had made it his business to pull over to ask me, "shu haida?" which means, "what's that/this?" while he pointed at my arm, thizz face on swoll. He paused, did his little "tsk tsk" sound and drove off. I should've told him it was a picture of his mom. oh well.
Speaking of my mom, here's something she might not approve of (bad segway): I had a strange urge to be adventurous when we got in the apartment the night of the flight so I ordered sheep's brains from Bar Bar, the middle eastern fast food restaraunt all over beirut. I had to get our new roommate taylor to ask for it, but with his thick syrian accent the dude taking the order still barely understood him. the food came. It was bland. nothing to tell really. I threw a bunch of yogurt on it to give it some flavor.
other than the ride home from the camp the other day with the beast of a man playing his own cd in the car there's really nothing else to tell. He had a muscle shirt on that seemed to be holding down the hair coming out of his sleeves. He seriously had two afros on both shoulders, nice as hell, but I imagine when he wears nice shirts it looks like he has shoulder pads on, or maybe he wets the hair down, maybe uses straightening gel or something. who knows?

Planes, precision guided bombs, beirut, Ahmed, evacuation, propaganda

We stepped out of the long terminal tube that connects airplane with the Visa stations set up like many movie ticket counters all in a row, our first breaths of Beirut air just as stifling as the first time. I'm telling you, if anyone decides to come and see us plan for any season but summer.
We went through the Visa line in 5 minutes, no problems, out to the baggage claim area where we were greeted by a man already pushing a luggage cart for our now reduced number of check-in pieces, still nothing felt weird about being back. We got in a cab, paid the foreigner price of 20 dollars for a ride out to Caracas, my new neighborhood on the sea with the Corniche just across the street. During the drive I looked at the signs that once held advertisements for grocery stores and face wash, jeans on sale and Pepsi, now replaced by epic photos from the war. One such photo had a baby curled up bleeding from it's abdomen that read, in english, "precision guided bombs." Every hundred meters or so there were more variations on the same grisly theme, a photo of Hezbollah troops loading a mid-range rocket launcher apparently capable of shooting as many as 5 rockets at once (their uniforms much less rag-tag than any shot I've seen in american media), a picture of an apartment building in Dahiye completely pancaked by Israeli launched missiles that read, "Made in the USA," and the most puzzling of them all: the photo of Mother Theresa with a hand caressing her face emerging just out of range of the camera with something in arabic written below her face. And still nothing felt weird about being back in Beirut, sure time has passed, a war has happened, but all the talk about how things would be "soooo different" is turning out to be pretty much untrue.
Immersed in the smog and quiet of the cab ride I wondered if on the other side of the border Israel had such signs up and down their highways. I doubted it, as with the US, the propaganda is best handled on the television in the form of news, commercial sound bytes, and made-for-TV movies yet to be released. Remember the classic US hit put out around the time of the first Iraq war "Not Without My Daughter," with Sally Field as the american female hero hell bent on getting her baby daughter back from the hordes of muslim kidnappers, fighting her way through sinister looking customs officials and a society that makes going to a christian church look like an orgy compared to the way ol' Sally was treated by the grubby hands of mens in long shirts with curly mustaches.
Nope, Lebanon is still using the old fashioned approach to shaping it's population's opinion, signs and slogans. If the actual air isn't a fresh breath, that sure is.
The next morning I woke up with raw memories of days past, the going away BBQ (thanks by the way to everyone who made it to the Golden Bull, where I was too-pooped-too-party, and especially Ryan who hung around til the very end), the Habanero Burger Extravaganza, and the Bayporter guy who had that condition where it seemed that both legs had been knocked in towards each other. He had permanent sea legs. I'll never forget Barbara (my pop's across the driveway neighbor) standing out on her front porch, fist shaking and brow furled behind her glasses, as the Bayporter guy tried to make a 23 point turn in the worst possible place between my dad's hedge and her Cadillac. Seriously, this is just a little reminder to all. Shaking your fist has now crossed the line from being intimidating to kinda funny, actually quite hilarious if used as a serious threat, especially at a Bayporter full of people about to leave the country. Just a reminder.
After a little waiting and reminiscing I left the house to meet Marina at the entrance to her school. She was running a little late, but standing around the dome of a saaj breakfast was our new roommate Andre, muscley military dude having a bit of a problem getting used to the not so staunch rigidness of arab university bureacracy. I told him my story of shit exploding out the back of the toilet as it also rose through the drain of the shower that I was standing in at our very first apartment a year ago. I hope he felt a little better. Or maybe it made him want to leave. I dunno', probably not though with the way he looked at every thick Lebanese chick that walked by. Oh yeah, I forgot to tell him that he might be having an extra tough time because he's black.
The rest of the day was spent with people who now seem like old friends even though I've known them no more than a year. At our friend Sunni's house we heard her story of evacuation during the war told only the way she can tell it, full of hilarity and exaggeration. As she was tired of waiting for the US to do something about her position she decided to take a bus with some other folks out to Jordan through the Bekaa Valley that was in the midst of one of the worst stages of a war that seemed to be mostly about the "bomb 'til they drop" strategy. The way she told it, her fiance Bassam was all of a sudden very interested in something on the floor of the bus and was adamant that she look at it, the whole time the other passengers were glued to the windows as Israeli bombers and battle helicopters blew the shit out of the town of Zahedi a few miles to their left with "precision guided bombs." About a year ago, Marina and I were taken on a little school excursion up to the same hilly town, half delicious food, half amusement park with a go-cart race track and video game arcade and a stream that ran through the main part of town besides the walkway that led to all the restaurants set up like patios beside the calm lull of the water, to the best of my knowledge, now blown up in a series of loud concrete and rock shattering splashes.
I know some of you think I'm weird for wanting to come back here, think it even more strange that in my heart of hearts I wished that I was here as everything was happening. Well, I guess it's kinda' the same as when people watch their house burn to the ground, or the way elephant's parade around their dead. Maybe there's some miracle that can come out of it all, or maybe it's just the desire to see as much of something or someone before it's gone, changed forever.
We hadn't eaten much, my belly still swollen from the habanero burger I had eaten the day before the flight, the restaurant made me sign a release form so that they couldn't be sued for too much spice. My belly still itches internally, so water and other liquids have been the way to go, what with the mattress of humidity on our backs and all. So when we called Ahmed and he invited us to the camp for Iftar (the feast after fasting during the 40 days of Ramadan) we were more than happy to have a meal on his roof as Beirut cooled and the sun set.
It was so good to see him. He seemed tired at first, but once he got on a tear we just listened for a minute as he regaled us with his stories of the war. He lives in South Beirut in the Bourj Al-Barajne Palestinian Refugee camp, and to give an idea of how close he was to some of the heaviest parts of the bombing, let's just say that standing on his roof we could see some of the same flattened apartment buildings and freeways that we saw on CNN, and his stories weren't the stories of escape, but those that reminded me of interviews that I saw with British who survived the Nazi's bombing campaign during WWII.
Ahmed's position in the camp is an odd one. He's a boyscout leader for the Fateh party, but on the side he is known to have many connections with people from all over the city, foreigner's especially. Apparently he was asked by a film crew to retrieve their equipment from Hezbollah who had seized it, probably in fear that they were spies. He made arrangements to be picked up by Hezbollah after they had determined that the footage was harmless. They got him and drove him to their part of town, but just as they were getting out of the car the building they were about to enter, about 500 meters away, was blown to shit, a strong man who had been riding with him grabbed Ahmed around the neck and swung him away from the blast. It was funny to hear him praise the courage and fearlessness of Hezbollah soldiers, as he is in the PLO, not exactly a bunch of pussies.
I'll post some more of his stories and get back to the habanero hamburger ordeal in future blogs, but I'm happy to be here and just to let everyone know, things do seem to be back to normal in most parts of the city. This morning Marina and I passed this lebanese dude in a cowboy hat, brown skin-tight lycra shirt, and cowboy boots. Things are definitely back to normal in our part of town.