TO COMMEMORATE THE PENTANNUAL ANNIVERSARY OF 9/11, I AM POSTING EXCERPTS FROM A NOVEL THAT I STARTED WRITING SHORTLY AFTER THAT DAY.
NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED, AND MANY LIBERTIES HAVE BEEN TAKEN WITH THE DIALOGUE. I'VE DONE NO EDITING WITHIN THE BODY OF THE TEXT, BUT CERTAIN PARTS I AM NOT RE-POSTING FOR PERSONAL REASONS.
IT'S AN INTERESTING DOCUMENT MOSTLY FOR THE IMMEDIACY OF THE MOMENT: I WANTED TO PRESERVE MY FEELINGS FOR POSTERITY.
THERE'S NO TITLE. IT JUST STARTS LIKE SO:
It is the first Sunday since World War III began.
That is to say, five days since terrorists hijacked United States airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center's Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
Thoughts have swirled deliriously in my mind non-stop in the last week. They are the kind of thoughts that need to be written down, so that when all of this madness passes, I can look at it all with some objectivity.
In fact, thoughts were swirling in mind about these matters even before September 11, 2001 rolled around. I can trace the unease back to the Friday before the weekend. Friday was the day I was going to fly out to Las Vegas for my sister's 21st birthday celebration. I didn't take the day off of work, so I had to book a last-minute flight to McCarren Airport. I also had to make last-minute arrangements for a hotel via the Travel Dept.
The Travel head was very helpful in getting me a discount on the Wellesly Inn, the same hotel that I had stayed at when I was last in Vegas. I was running around taking care of things, using my lunch hours to purchase a ticket at a local travel agency and trying to cash my $300 tax rebate and I couldn't go to the bank because my bank account was overdrawn by $400.
So Friday was a stressful day, and the fact that I didn't have a car it made it all the more frustrating. But I secured a ride to Burbank Airport from a friend and made it into Vegas around 9:20 PM. It was a one-way flight, notable for the fact that my carry-on baggage was checked, for the first time ever, and also for the fact that I sat next to a very beautiful woman who was in a bad mood and didn't want to talk to me during the half-hour flight. My family picked me up from the airport and took me to my hotel, where I checked in and left my bags. Then we went to dinner.
Throughout the weekend I was reading a copy of Turning The Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace by respected leftist scholar Noam Chomsky. In between the festivities and familial outings I often paused to read sections of the book, which was published in 1985, at the height of Reaganism and the Contra-Sandinista battles in Nicaragua.
My parents asked me if they should invest in a timeshare in Las Vegas. We sat by the pool, discussing the merits of the timeshare. The Chomsky book was really what was on my mind.
I couldn't eat at the buffet that day, after reading on how the U.S. keeps Central American countries from democratically electing their own leftist government; how the death squads (or "freedom fighters" as we like to euphemize here in the States) kill scores of children, burn villages to the ground, rape and mutilate the women, and torture suspected guerilla sympathizers by slitting their throats, slicing their abdomens open and letting their bowels hang out and gouging their eyes out; how we force countries to change their exports, making them farm for us while their own people starve, taking the crops away as destitute families watch the food they worked long and hard to cultivate get shipped to North America, where spoiled five-year olds leave their dinner plates unfinished as they ask their mothers for dessert.
I didn't want to talk politics with my family. They are conservative to a degree, although my mother shocked me by voting for Al Gore in the 2000 election. She didn't think George W. Bush had "leadership qualities"...
But the words from the book spoke to my conscience. Even though the book had been written sixteen years earlier, it was relevant because things hadn't changed much in those sixteen years. But we were in Vegas to celebrate my sister's twenty-first birthday, and I wanted to keep my usual penchant for controversy on the back burner.
I asked my older brother Joe, "Do you remember when you were in the Army? You wrote me a letter saying you thought our government was corrupt..."
In between bites he replied, "Yeah. I remember that."
"What did you mean by that?" I asked.
He paused. He looked at me with his usual seriousness and said, "I just meant that the military is racist. I watched as other guys who were less qualified than I was were getting promotions and all that. It was discouraging, know what I mean?"
"You don't think that the military would wage war against its own people, do you?"
"Who's to say? I would hope that they wouldn't. If they did, it would be against people like us-- minorities, foreigners, the poor..."
"What did you think of Three Kings?"
I asked Joe this particular question because he had been in the First Cavalry in the Gulf War. I wondered how much action he saw on the ground.
"It was alright. But if you're asking if that movie was accurate, I'd have to say no, based on my personal experience."
"And that was...?"
"The Iraqis were surrendering on the spot. Supposedly this was Hussein's Republican Guard, his elite corps. It was sort of a gyp in a way, because all they did was put their hands up. After a while, we were all like, 'Damn, this ain't exactly what I was expecting!'"
"So you didn't see any of the atrocities that happened?"
"Not where we were at. We weren't dealing with villages and townspeople and all that. We were there strictly to fight. But it wasn't even a fight."
I left the conversation at that. We all went out to the Vegas Strip and watched the Treasure Island sidewalk show. Cannons blared, bucklers swashed, and people applauded. Nothing like a spectacular battle in the middle of Las Vegas to keep people happy. We watched it from across the street, because it was too crowded for all of my family to get a good view in front.
On Sunday my sister's fiancee drove half of the way; I drove the other half. I made it back to Sherman Oaks at 5:05 PM, barely missing the earthquake that gently rocked the Southland just minutes before. I wasn't in my apartment for ten minutes before I was talking with Flora, my old high school friend on the phone. She'd left a message, and I was calling her back.
"I need to stay at your house."
"Okay... Any reason why you need to stay here, as opposed to your own home with..."
"I'm getting a divorce from Fred."
"Whoa... Slow down, start from the beginning."
I'd always wondered when Flora was going to get sick of her marital status. I'd told her not to get married, and she went ahead and did it anyway. She'd known Fred for three months before the announcement of engagement. Less than a year later they were walking down the aisle.
And eight years later she'd had enough.
"Fred just doesn't care about the things I hold dear. We've tried to make deals and compromise, but he always slips back into his old habits and forgets that we ever had a problem to begin with. He says that if I'd only let him smoke pot and get drunk everything would be okay."
"Sounds like what I told Jeanie," I said. Jeanie was my last girlfriend.
"It's not about that, though. I just don't find him attractive anymore. We have to be wasted to have it. I love him, I care about him-- how can you not, after eight years? But it's not passionate. I don't know if it's ever been passionate."
"Why did you marry him in the fist place?"
I knew the answer to this last question of mine. At the time, she said it had to do with her citizenship-- she was born in the Phillipines --but I felt that she was in a hurry to get out of her parents' house, and she saw no other palatable option.
"I thought it was a good idea at the time."
I told her she could stay until she got her footing. But I was somewhat wary: I'd been living by myself for two years now, without roommates, and was very used to it. Still, I would help Flora out no matter what. She said she'd bring her things by later. She wanted to tell her parents the news first.
I cleaned up my apartment. Living single, and having been out of town for the weekend, my place was a mess. There was cat hair everyhwere, and I hadn't dusted or vacuumed in a month. I did my laundry, read portions of the Chomsky book, and smoked some weed. I even took a nap. Time passed, and Flora showed up at my door in the evening. I helped her with her bags and cleared some closet space for her things.
Within minutes of her arrival, my place already looked like a woman was living there. We made some cocktail shrimp and talked about things. She offerd to pay me some rent, but I said that all she had to do was give me some spending money until the end of the week. I had a feeling she wouldn't be here long. My place was falling apart, and seing that it was a one-bedroom apartment I didn't forsee her getting used to sleeping on the couch. I said she could sleep in my bed, and that I'd sleep on the couch, but she didn't want to be a bother. We smoked cigarettes and talked, and then I went to bed.
The next morning, she went to work, and after she left I went to the market. I used some of the money she gave me to buy groceries. Then, I caught a bus and went to work.
Work was normal, which meant that I stayed in my office most of the day. I was socializing less and less with my corporate co-workers. Except for the one or two friends that I had made while working there, I didn't really like anyone there. They were all too obsessed with making money and having status. They all had SUVs, and I rode the bus; they all liked bands like Dave Matthews and Uncle Kracker, and I liked anything that wasn't mainstream; they all thought movies like Pearl Harbor were great; I was a fan of Jim Jarmusch and John Waters and any movie that hadn't been put through the Hollywood meat-grinder. So I kept to myself and let the herds of sheep do their things, and they ignored me in the usual manner that they did. I had a reputation for being sharp-tongued and sarcastic, and no one wanted to hear what I had to say about current events and such.
Mac, my friend whom I had procured a mail delivery job, asked me what I wanted to do for lunch. We did our normal routine: go to his house, smoke weed, grab fast food on the way back, and talk about how screwed up America was.
"I've been reading Chomsky, man. Very intense shit."
"Yeah, Chomsky breaks it down all proper, " Mac said, as he smoked a bongload. "He knows his shit. That book's all about how we fucked up Central America."
"And the people of this country don't even know how bad we are in other parts of the world. If they knew, they'd be less proud to be Americans, that's for sure."
"Dude, we're so hated by the rest of the world. There's a long list of countries that would love to fuck us up. Just for being allies with Israel, too! I'm not even counting all the countries who are jealous of our prosperity. I mean, after WWII we didn't have to rebuild at all. We lent England and France and all those European countries money, and they never paid us back. That's why they resent us, by the way. They hate us for being so insulated, so detached from what's going on."
"Yeah, man. You're right. No one can stand up to us. We're the Great Satan. That's why I admire people like Castro. Fidel Castro stood up to the U.S. and told us where to put it. Sure, he's paying the price through economic sanctions, but he's still there, and until he kicks the bucket America is gonna have to keep its grubby imperialistic paws off of Cuba."
"I hear you man. The same with Ho Chi Minh. He asked the U.S. for assistance, and they chased him out of the Embassy. So he went to the Russians for help. I can't blame him for that. We wouldn't listen to him."
"I'm telling you, man. America has got some real bad karma to answer for. This country was built on blood, and a lot more blood is going to be shed as time goes on."
We were more critical than normal. I was reeling from the Chomsky book, and Mac had a chip on his shoulder ever since his days living in Las Vegas as a punk rocker.
Little did we know what awaited us in the next few days.
NEXT INSTALLMENT: Tomorrow
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