Chapter 1-The Beginning of the Middle

From the novel All Together Now by moi!

This story begins as these stories often do, from the middle. I am twenty-three years old and on the wrong end of an M-16 rifle. It’s March and the year is 1988…

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“I see a red door/and I want to paint it black…”

The Stones song marching through my head on that last night in the States was actually played by Echo & the Bunnymen. I was in my room, dreading this trip I was about to go on. Now Echo hailed from Liverpool, England and they were one of the reasons anyone of any real taste had a good 1980s. They owned the decade as far as I was concerned. At least they did in Los Angeles where I grew up and in 1985, I saw them play three nights in three venues; Universal Amphitheater, Pacific Amphitheater, and Irvine Meadows. They sold out all three places and it was hysteria as soon as they came on stage. Just so fucking epic. Ian McCullough even made smoking look cool. Lead singers can do that, even though I was a drummer. I actually had all my pants cuffed and tailored because that’s what Echo did.  Much was made of their contemporaries, U2, the Smiths and R.E.M. While I liked all kinds of music and bands, Echo were it to me.

The night before I left the United States for the Middle East, I repeatedly listened to a live 3-song EP recorded in Germany, alone in my room. It was Echo covering “Paint It Black” by the Rolling Stones, “Friction” by Television and “Run, Run, Run” by The Velvet Underground. If I didn’t know the songs, I’d have sworn the band wrote them. They had that intangible quality that made me want to hear more.

My old college roommate and I lived in an old craftsman house in an even older neighborhood just outside of Los Angeles. I had these French doors in my room which I had open all the time, despite living on the first floor. There were bushes on the side of the house so no one could see from the street. The moon would shine through the bushes and splash onto the floor in my room. I could see their shadows move as the breeze blew. Because of this camouflage, I left the doors open all the time which was great because the jasmine, wafting through town, would drift inside that time of the year. That smell was peaceful to me. Always felt like I was home.

That night my room was dark except for my desk lamp. This was all the light I needed, especially when the moonlight fell in from the other side. I didn’t sleep because I couldn’t. I sat and watched the record go round and round and round, patiently waiting for the needle to lift so it would start over again. Shelly was on my mind. We had broken up two years before and back then she was as into Echo as I was.

The night we broke up wrecked me, and she did it in this room. I had never felt that way about anyone up to that point. If I was quizzed about it I couldn’t tell you if it was love or I just got used to her. What stayed with me was how I dropped to my knees, burying my face into her stomach, my arms tightly around her hips and wailing as I begged her not to end us. I don’t know why I was so overcome but I was. I didn’t even know what was so lost that had me drop to my knees in that way. Frankly, we hadn’t been very passionate as much as we dissolved into being really cool buddies and I knew it. For about six months, I even thought of dumping the whole thing myself a couple of times but was too lazy or scared and I didn't know which. So my grief came because maybe she just beat me to it. Petty, I imagine, but I was still hurt.

In the beginning, all we did was fuck and laugh. After eighteen months, we were simply keeping each other company. Guys were coming onto her at our shows and at parties. That didn’t happen in the first six months we were together and I think it’s because she put out that “I’m taken” vibe. Maybe I thought it would get better again, maybe she knew it wouldn’t. What I did know is that if she was gone for more than a couple months, she’d be gone for good. That was the sinking feeling that probably drove me to my knees that night. Could be why I was riding things out; I had never been very good at “getting back together” once much time had passed. A couple of girls had tried and failed spectacularly as I lost all interest. I was always excited by the devil I didn’t know…

She’d regret her decision later and I would see it in the saddest way.

I played the Echo record over and over until dawn. The anxiety of my impending trip, was weighing on me. I somehow felt doomed. Funny thing about pressure, real or imagined, it brings the most random things to bear. Those weren’t even my three “desert island” songs but it didn’t matter because there weren’t any three songs I wanted to hear any more than those three and right now, repeatedly. Who knows? I listened, paced and played my own guitar along with the record. The light in my room was the only light on in my house. My roommate had said his goodbyes and split to his girlfriends’ house. I had a framed poster of the film “Easy Rider” in the darker corner of my room. Staring at it as I played my guitar, Peter Fonda had his back to me in the dark, looking like he was ready to turn around and say something significant to me. The field in the background looked like it was moving in the breeze, as though Fonda had the one secret that could save my soul. But he just stood there, his sunglasses over his eyes, earnestly searching an American landscape that was long gone with the movie tagline,

“A man went looking for America and couldn’t find it anywhere.”

I didn’t always feel at home but I knew this was a good country. There were good people despite feeling out of place at times which probably came from my being a bit “arty” anyway. This was requisite musician behavior especially as a 23 year old working to find his place in the world. I was kind of a weird kid growing up. But I loved what America stood for, since nowhere was perfect and I was about to find that out.

I was wired and couldn’t sleep so I went for a walk in the middle of the night, trying to wear myself out, came back and played the Echo record again and again. I still couldn’t sleep and I was too wound up for jacking off to have the desired narcotic effect because I did and it didn’t. Packing my bags should have worn me out enough to have a solid nap but not that night. Maybe I should have smoked a joint but then my dad would smell it when he and my cousin came to pick me up and I didn’t want a scene.

My dad was religious like most people but despite any earlier tendencies I may have had toward a more pious existence, rock and roll and the West had become my true religion with my nascent decadence still under some tacit discipline. We all have something higher than ourselves to aspire to but I was prepared to live with the spiritual uncertainty a lack of faith could bring.   

I was still up when my dad and cousin came to pick me up to go to the airport. Maybe that’s why I had Shelly on the brain. Maybe I felt anger, mixed with self pity that no one would miss me, that she was part of “my life passing before my eyes” and there wasn’t as much to show for that life as I wanted. The funny thing about that last night in the States was that I was playing that record like I was going to die.

Maybe I was.

Even though I had never really feared death, I still had no desire to go. Not to the Middle East anyway and not fucking now.

For me “fucking now” was playing in a band and working at a record company in Los Angeles, California. The sole purposes of which were to a) keep my dad off my ass because I was “using my degree” and b) to make connections and learn the music business so me and my band could avoid being screwed. Those stories were legion and I always kept the Badfinger story front and center; they let themselves get talked into leaving the Beatles label and signed various deals with several devils which left them broke despite several years of Top 10 hits and sold out shows. Two of the guys even killed themselves. That was a tale of what could happen if I lost focus and let others find clarity for me like it’s a favor. There are no free favors. Everything costs.

Things were going well when my father tearfully asked me to perform this pilgrimage by taking my dead cousin back to be buried in his family’s plot. It was to the West Bank of Jordan which had been occupied by Israel since 1967. I was not up to it in the least but my dad didn’t really care about whatever would be for anyone’s’ good but his. He was also a wildly manipulative man with habits bordering on the Shakespearean so he threw in a good old fashioned crying jag for good measure. I’m sure he meant some of it and he got the desired result so who was I but his son, to judge?

The poet once said, “Many a father begins as a king, but ends up as a king in exile.”  My dad was well on his way to an exile from us kids whether we knew it at the time or not, so not caring about his emotional state was something I was used to for a long time now. Moments are funny like that;

I am twelve years old and having fallen off a roof, I tore my arm open. I required over thirty stitches. With my arm in a sling, I took a beating as soon as we got home from the hospital. My mother had to pull my father off me. Spittle ran down his chin, catching his breath as he taught me a “lesson.”

“We should have let him bleed to death!” He screamed at my mom, “Teach him a lesson when he dies!” I was twelve and the hospital visit cost a hundred bucks but I still don’t know if it was the money or that I could have been killed and that freaked him out. I imagine I was required to discern this from the beating.

Dad couldn’t go to Israel or the West Bank at the time because he was still on a green card with his own U.S. citizenship a few years away. Being there on a green card, the Israelis could have kept him indefinitely and on any whim too. In hindsight, I should have let him go as time in an Israeli jail may have done him some good and maybe cooled him out. But I didn’t. Not at twenty-three, for it was my naïve hope that this small courtesy might finally get me that connection with my dad at last. Gratitude, however, was not a strong suit of his.

I told the band and my boss at the record company I worked at that I would be gone for a few weeks. My band had just gotten a manager and she was earning that potential ten percent. The write ups were just starting to show up in the L.A. Weekly and the Times. We were having the time of our lives. I was the drummer and wrote songs with our singer, Derrick, who was a real cool guy. He was an assistant to one of the busiest photographers in Los Angeles, while shooting his own art stuff on the side so he did all our band pictures. He was real good. I wasn’t particularly photogenic and even I liked the way the pictures came out.

We’d go out to clubs after practice, milking the local recognition for all the juice it was worth; networking for better shows, although we never dared call it that but we really treated the band like a business, saving our gig money in a joint account which paid for rehearsal space, demos and equipment. We met girls through his work, my work, the band, it was epic. A record deal was right around the corner, I could feel it. We had the world by the balls and our shows were getting better. What’s more, the band was a family I had chosen to be in. We were in business together and we partied together.

Jim and I had met Derrick and Paul while I was a college intern at the record company I ended up working at, C.I.A Records, a label started by the son of an ex-Army intelligence officer. It stood for “Artistic International Conspiracy” but backwards so it was very spy like.

Derrick had dated Julie, this other intern I knew and she introduced us. I was a drummer and Jim, whom I had known for a few years, played bass. We were best friends and we always said we should be in a band together. We were always playing with other guys that we didn’t like very much.

One day we said, “fuck it” and decided to do our own thing. We started looking for a singer and guitar player and that’s where Derrick brought Paul. Julie introduced us and we all hit it off immediately on a personal level. We still had to see if we could be a band so we jammed for a couple months in my living room. As long as we did it when no one was home, my roommates were cool with it.

Things were humming along OK when one night, we were practicing and Derrick was tired and we were just not clicking that night. We had been working on some of our own tunes. He stopped, took a draw on his beer and screamed, “Sire! The people are revolting!”

To which Jim and I responded in unison, “You can say that again!”

This was a Marx Brothers reference from a very old film and the small fact of him getting that, meant the world to me. Jim just thought it was funny. It seems so inconsequential, looking back on it now but I felt like I discovered flight that evening.

We decided to be a band and we called ourselves “Mayan Tango.” The name didn’t come from any one of us, which made it more democratic. We were stuck for a name and Jims’ friend Rick had just gotten back from Mexico where he saw a Mayan art exhibit and was inspired. Since we were drawing blanks and egos were rampant, it just made sense. So we were Mayan Tango.

We went from begging for shows at the worst places to getting weekends at some of the best clubs in Los Angeles within 18 months or so. We were drawing good crowds at our shows and opening for some pretty big groups like Primus and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. We worked fucking hard. We were not even close to what we ultimately wanted but the path was getting sweeter. People would think that it’s one big step to success but it’s a business fought by bloody inches as I imagine any business or something worthwhile usually is. We had to simply do it and live with tension and working to “making it.” This was paramount above all else which made it difficult to just enjoy the moment for the moments’ sake sometimes. Life is comprised of moments as events come and go but we will be dead forever. I wanted to learn to enjoy the moments.

Derrick and I wrote all our songs. Playing covers paid more but the point was to get a record deal, sell our songs and be rock stars, not playing “Louie, Louie” to fucking drunks in Orange County.

So going away at this time was a huge favor to my dad, but it wasn’t enough. He wanted me to cut my hair as it was down past my shoulders. I cut it but not all the way off. I wanted to grow it back faster when I got home, after all I liked it. It was my hair. He said it made me look like a fag. He had an odd logic that often left me wondering where I was supposed to be won over.

So here I was on the wrong end of an M-16. At twenty-three. In the desert…

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We were crossing the border from Jordan into the West Bank. My cousin, Ali and I have our dead kin with us. Alis’ brother died suddenly at work in Los Angeles, from a heart attack at twenty-eight years of age. He seized up and dropped dead in front of an accounts receivables woman as he was asking after something of vital importance the point of which vanished when he died right in front of her. Her name was Hilda or Helga, I forget which but she was a plump Latina woman who was very nice to our family at the service we held in L.A. She hugged my mother in the greeting line who was also crying like it was her own child. Mom really did like my cousin.

There is nothing quite like the ashen faces death brings to a funeral. Even if people didn’t like the person, they look like soldiers on a troop truck to hell.

Personally, I thought it was drug related. However, I would not have brought that up to my dad. Even thinking that would crush him; he may have been a hypocrite but he wanted to believe that the family was doing the right thing at all times. Dad paid good money to send his nephew back home to be buried with his father. He was my dads’ brother-in-law, whom he respected a great deal. There were a lot of mandatory religious traditions but going back to the homeland to be buried wasn’t one of them. If anything, it was a grandiose way for my father to show his family that he “raised his kids right,” sending the oldest boy to handle “family business.” The family opinion was all that mattered to him.

My dad left home at seventeen and met my mother in Brazil five years later. Of course, she lived there and she was a Catholic. They married and came to the United States in the 1960s, where my brothers and I were born. This kind of matrimony was very risky. I had grown up religious (before logic, women and drink got the better of me) and found that divergent philosophies can do as much damage to a marriage as coming home to your bride with a case of the crabs. There’s a verse in the Bible about being equally yoked. I felt not enough people took it seriously.

However, being the eldest son, it fell on me to take the body back with Ali, my other, more alive cousin. Ali was not the eldest in his family as that distinction belonged to an aggressively annoying human being in the form of his brother. No one really cared for him due to an over indulgent sense of self pity and revenge on anything with a pulse that had the slightest tinge of paying him even a perceived insult.

He’s a millionaire these days but I would never blame the money for how he turned out as he was that way when we found him. Charm and ethics can’t be bought. He had a bad fallout with his mother so they weren’t speaking and he was not speaking to the dead brother when his heart exploded. They had a fight for different reasons entirely. He had other failings in personal and business relationships with the family that left most feeling ripped off, betrayed, hurt or a combination of all three. He was not the least bit remorseful about any of it as it was “their problem.” Those boys were born in Ramallah, 20 minutes away from their village where my father also grew up. Their mother still lived there.

So here I was this very American guy in the Middle East. There’s an old joke with a punch line about it being different than the Mid West. I don’t remember the joke itself but the punch line was so goddamned true.

We landed in Amman, Jordan and stayed with my dad’s cousin, Roman, for 3 days but it felt longer. Hell, we have a dead guy with us so we had all the fucking time in the world! Landing in Tel Aviv was certainly allowed, but not advisable. We could have been held in a processing center for a couple weeks before they got around to us and things would not speed up because we had a dead body, not at all. This would have been an inconvenience if not a complete fucking drag. So Jordan it was and our gracious host, Roman, being politically connected, expedited our papers much faster than any traditional means would allow. Watching him negotiate, back slap and glad hand the local cronies was quite impressive and he liked to hand out Cuban cigars. I always knew that if you speak the tongue and wave some dollars around, “officials” in these shitholes give in easily. Of course it was our dollars he was waving but I was still impressed with how cheap bribery was here, what with the exchange rate and all. I wondered what else was easy to get through customs if one were so inclined. The fish does rot from the head. King Husseins’ rule hinged on convincing folks that he was a direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. It worked, for the most part. People do whatever the hell they need to for control. A little bit of sacrilege? Perhaps, but my question was, “So what if it was true? Wasn’t Mohammed just a guy?” Every religion has a version of that very question and no one likes to be asked much about it. Customs was no exception there.

Because I was wiped out from the flight, the Amman journey and basically over all the travel, I was still in the proverbial coma. I believe Roman was a former Deputy Assistant Minister of Communication, or something. This more than made up for the extra three days our visit took and was a wildly impressive feat, as feats go with martial law or bureaucrats in the Third World.

Amman was like any large city that you would find in Europe but without really any major point of interest that I can recall. It wasn’t Mecca or Paris and Dubai was 20 years away. Maybe I was too zoned out. What I noticed about Jordan though was how everything was kind of incomplete looking if not just grimy. The smells ran the gamut of a “good block, bad block” scenario; some spots were lush and the powers of the city went out of their way to cultivate a lot of shrubbery. Other spots suffered from outdoor plumbing which smelled like the rot of old food and garbage. These were open sewers that ran parallel to the sidewalks. Not all but a lot of the buildings kind of had that “What were we thinking? Let’s start over” vibe. Unfinished homes or mini malls dotted the streets in between homes that were lived in though I wouldn’t even call those homes quite finished either.

I began to notice that every shop or business had a huge, framed portrait of King Hussein. God help me, if I had talked shit about the King, man. I would have disappeared, as in fucking gone or more to the point, dead. I found this out when our erstwhile guide, Roman corrected me.

We were in a breakfast place when I had noticed this trend in royal portraiture and attempted humor, “Man, they must really love the King, here, huh?”

Roman turned to Ali and me, with his eyes squinted and “SSShhhh” was all he said.

I got it, thankfully, but when we walked outside of the café, he told Ali in Arabic, then me, “If you want a long, healthy life, it’s best to say nothing about the King. It does not matter for your passport.”

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To cross into the West Bank, which was essentially Israel, with a dead body, was not something to enter into lightly. Security was no joke and this was before suicide bombing became a fad of a mentally disturbed contingent, that some would call freedom fighters. I got that they were fighting an oppressor but if I were dead then there’d be no freedom. At least, that’s how I saw it. The obvious points get lost on us when we’re heated up. I also didn’t think God or an Allah needed that kind of help.

My other concern was that the seventy-two virgins they promised Muslims for their martyrdom could be really ugly; they could look like my Aunt Fatima who was a dried up old maid with moles that had hairs stiff as speaker wire coming out of them and a headscarf to hide the fact that she was balding. She lived with my parents in the U.S. and my brothers and I called her the “lump.” Of course, this could be why they’re eternal virgins to begin with. My aunt was no beauty queen and charm was not long on her list of virtues.

Roman rode shotgun in the ambulance with us to guide the driver. He wore a suit with no tie which, in Jordan, gave him an air of authority. While our papers were cheap, it meant we had to go through a specific checkpoint because that’s basically where our bribe counted. We pulled up to a cinder block bunker in the middle of bloody hell. It straddled an open sewage stream and the smell was recognizable, which was a polite way of saying it smelled like shit but thank God the water moved so the shit didn’t sit still. I knew I hit bottom when such an observation made me grateful. Technically, we were still in Jordan but it looked the same on both sides of the stream, frankly.

The area made an average American trailer park look like Shangri-fucking-la. It was in one of the vast, undeveloped sections of the West Bank which was basically a no man’s' land. Humidity and dust clung to you like muddy mist as soon as you got out of the car. Our Jordanian host got back into the ambulance after we said our goodbyes and took off. Israeli soldiers took the body around to the back which was blocked to the public by guards. However, they did give us a receipt which, despite the professionalism, reminded me of an absurd comedy sketch.

Even Ali, who was not really one for sarcasm grimaced as he said, “Oh wow! A receipt!”

They would spend three hours on him, combing the carcass for plastic explosives before we get him back. He was covered with a sheet on a stretcher and we didn’t get the coffin back. We didn’t lift the sheet. It was a slow day at the checkpoint and we had faith…

The coffin came in handy for the funeral in the States as well as the flight. Muslims just wrap a guy up, say a prayer and slide him into a crypt. Israelis use the confiscated coffins to bury indigent Jewish settlers. The $3,000 it cost was dads’ de facto contribution to the State of Israel even if he spoke no Hebrew. My father called such actions the “cost of faith” as he believed one had to do the right thing by faith when one could. Of course, like most people, the right thing was what would serve him best in the end, sanctioned by God. It’s interesting how God does that.

As we walked into the front of the checkpoint, we got patted down for weapons and contraband. The place bore a striking resemblance to an American DMV. The floors were of that soft, cheap brown linoleum that was in my junior high school cafeteria. There must be a U.N. charter invoking the mandatory use of government-issue, light green paint so decreed by the international light green paint lobby. There were two men with M-16s, pointed at us as benignly as one could point a gun at people. Tourism issues warranted a maintained feeling of welcome so one can’t point guns menacingly at the tourists or locals. They scare easy. Without the guards, I would have thought I was back at my old high school except for the faint, shit smell creeping in through the walls, blown around by the ceiling fans.

The guards also took our shoes.

There is something subservient to removing ones’ shoes at gun point or doing anything at gun point. There is no real cool way of doing it without being in a vulnerable position (kneeling down is obvious but doing it while standing keeps one off balance and thus not cool) and they kept our shoes the whole time they dealt with us. This way, if we tried to run they would have had an easier time shooting us. Our socks would fill up with dirt and sand and weigh us down.

As Ali and I were processed I had this sick “going to prison” feeling, even though I knew this wasn’t jail, at least not yet.

Then I hear, “You American?” My theory is that my longish hair and over coat betrayed me although I could have been European, too. But why would the Europeans come here when the south of France promised wine, cheese and topless French girls?

I looked up and saw a very American grin, American teeth and all. The Israeli says, “I’m Liev…What’s your name, man?” I tell him and then he asks, “Where you from?”

“L.A.,” I answer proudly, used to having said that anytime I left home. Mentioning the state or country was not necessary when you’re from L.A., man. “How ‘bout you?” I asked.

“Jersey,” he said looking around, “This was a fucking mistake…you visiting?” When I said that I was, he offered, “Whatever you do, don’t live here, man. I mean it…”

At that point I wondered if it wasn’t some sort of trick. I have read about tricks.

Frankly, I was also a little checked out right then, for obvious reasons, “Yeah, wow… no man, I am just visiting…” I nod in the direction of my dead cousin and pointing toward the back, “You know, stuff brought me here…Jersey, huh? Shit, well…what brings you here?”

“Fucking brochure those ‘Right of Return’ fuckers fed me, man. They show you a great time in Tel Aviv but then you get here…Milk and honey my ass, man. It’s the middle of nowhere, fucking nowhere!” Liev shakes his head, “I haven’t seen a good show since Springsteen at the Garden in ‘85,” his grin long having vanished at that point.

I told him about the U2 show I saw at the Coliseum with the Pretenders having opened. Told him about the R.E.M. show I saw in San Diego in 1986 before they got real big. It was their last festival seating show and I saw it at the San Diego State gym.

He looked to one side as he’d been whispering the whole time, “As soon as this tour is over, I’m out. I can be a Jew at home. Who needs this shit, you know what I mean?” He was speaking of his tour of duty in the Israeli Army. It was in our moment of truth that Liev’s superior appeared over his shoulder like a bad moon rising.

I suspiciously nodded my agreement as my shoeless cousin tapped my elbow and shook his head subtly, arching an eyebrow. Apparently, we were each fraternizing with the enemy. What both of these guys didn’t understand is that we were Americans and not the enemy!

Liev was nothing more to me but a dude who didn’t like it there. I was 23 years old and we were about the same age and we cared more about rock and roll and movies and art than we did for miniature dirt wars fought by the masses, energized by dead gods and fairy tales. I’m certain that in a conversation at a party, this view may sound venal and offensive, “But as opposed to what?” I thought. Religion? A practice that was so deep and worked so well that it was worth killing or jailing people for? I thought if it worked, there’d be no killing and those that believe in forgiveness could forgive the fact that I didn’t get it.

So what makes me better off? Is art god, then? I had no answers but in my perfect world, nobody dies and everybody went to heaven, which I pictured to be a cool museum where the best live music would be played in the next room; everything from Brahms to Hendrix to Miles Davis to Echo and the Bunnymen and not just because I liked it but because the world is better for all of it and the food would rock.

It’s where I’d get between six and eight extremely hot professionals instead of seventy-two really ugly, un-laid chicks. Whatever I termed as my poison would be my chosen heaven not to be dictated by some dude in a tall hat and a dress. This would be a place where, if God did build it, he splits and lets us enjoy it because that’s why the God of my design built it for his kids in the first place. But all my anger and inner dialog was not going to help change that day or what happened before. I’m learning to live with that.

I also came here for a reason. I had a dead cousin who just wanted to be buried with his father, in the manner of his religion and who am I to judge?

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“Teenage Mary said to Uncle Dave/I sold my soul, must be saved/Gonna take a walk down to Union Square/You never know who you're gonna find there…”

There was a group of family members waiting for us as we got out of the bunker area and on to the main highway. The road was paved but still very dusty because this area had no real plants to speak of. The dust blew easily and the humidity made it worse. It was desolate as the wind spread more desert upon us which clung to our sweat.

The military escort transferred the body from their jeep to the waiting ambulance one of my uncles had contracted. The soldiers were very polite and professional. Liev was one of them and he did the cool guy nod thing that guys give each other when they’re trying to be subtle. The Arabs didn’t quite ignore the Jews but were pleasant without kissing a bunch of ass.

My Uncle Ayoub and a couple of cousins helped the Israelis with the stretcher. The ambulance door was closed and Ayoub looked at one of the Israeli boys and smiled sadly as he patted him on the shoulder with an attitude of patriarchal humanity versus oppressed and the oppressor. I was strangely comforted by that even though the moment was brief. There seemed to be a tacit understanding between some in these two camps that they did what they had to do to get along. Neither side here was kingmaker but simple errand boys, sent by the grocer to collect the bill as the poet once said.

Ali kissed my Uncle Ayoub three times on the cheek, “Assalamu alaikum,” he said. “Alaikum salaam,” Ali returned the greeting. I spoke next to no Arabic but I heard this all my life so I could at least say that even though I was resolute in the non religious aspect of my life. My uncle kissed me three times too. I felt relieved by him in a strange way, having just met him but I guess his attitude toward the Israelis gave me a bit of hope. I was used to this side of the family exhibiting contempt and derision but not him. He was different and I felt a connection. I could see it in his eyes.

Everyone was dressed in khakis or jeans with windbreakers or sweaters. Ayoub, however, was in a floor length duster, kind of like the white ones the sheiks wore, except his was brown and wool, not silk. It still looked cool with his keffiyeh around his head, setting him apart from the others.

There was definitely a mixed feeling because it was obvious we were not on vacation but all were glad to see us safe, just the same. I had not met many of my fathers’ family before except for the handful of cousins or the occasional U.S. visit by one of his brothers or sisters. My Uncle Ayoub had never made these visits but was genuinely glad to meet me as all they had were pictures of his brother’s sons. We all hugged and kissed everyone on the cheek three times, exchanging “Assalamu alaikums.” It’s just what they do.

Having gone to Brazil without complaint, I made many excuses the several times my father made his trips here. I thought that I couldn’t deal with an entire family of him. Of course, I was a kid and never knew my uncle was not like his brother at all. He actually went out of his way to make me feel welcome although I spoke no Arabic and he spoke zero English. In the end, he would prove kinder to me than most of those who spoke my language.

A good friend of mine lost his father when he was ten years old. I see that it still affects him as a grown man. While no one ever really gets over it at any age, at ten our fathers are fucking heroes. Custer, riding high on his trusty steed, before the Indians turn him into a pin cushion. Paternal perfection frozen in time…

The American Indian was always made to be the bad guy with history being written by the winners. If my own dad died when I was ten I would have glossed over his shortcomings completely, revising a history that couldn’t exist given his disposition. He’d have died a winner, forever young. He wouldn’t have gotten a good running start on destroying the hero’s image which only ruins as life forges on or if I wasn’t a student of history.

We tend to forget the good things people do. My father did some good but I always had to reference his past or hear it told by someone else to catch a glimmer of that good. He always had this near consistent animosity toward his sons. Ayoub was different but then maybe I was the third party source for his own kids.

My paternal grandfather sent my mother a platinum cross as a wedding gift when my parents got married in Brazil. Not a very Muslim gesture I suppose but he was welcoming of anyone coming into the family and especially if they were able to provide grandchildren. My father reviled this gesture for what he considered weakness and worked real hard to be the asshole his own father was not. He attributed his fathers’ “lack of successes” in life to such weak hearted folly. My father never spoke to us in Arabic, unless he was cussing at us. He usually spoke to us in Portuguese, which he learned in Brazil or English due to laziness. I found that this was common among the half bred children of Arabs of which there were quite a few, especially in our family. It was just something I learned to live with.

It was because of this lack of instruction, in speaking Arabic, that I recognized only some of the words of grief or reverence for a God I’m not too sure gave a shit to begin with. Here, on the roadside, there was the animated, Biblical wailing that one is used to seeing on TV in news reports on the Mid East. The men were choked up pretty bad and some were outright bawling. 28 years of age is awfully young to die and the few women that came (my aunt, Mahmuds’ mom, elected to wait at home) were openly screaming something in Arabic, with hands in the air to God that I’m sure was a combination of praise and rhetorical questioning.

Another car skidded to a stop next to the ambulance. It was Ali’s asshole older brother, Adnan, who went by “Eddie.” He was late but made a big production of demanding to see “my baby brother!”  In his tradition of being a selfish prick, he couldn’t even ride in the cars with the rest of the family.

He approached our side of the ambulance, hands waving, “If you don’t let me see him, I’ll smash this window open!” He had picked up a good sized boulder, popping it out of the dirt, from the roadside. It was bigger than he thought and further in the ground, which made the gesture less smooth and thus less macho than intended, but he somehow made it work. I chuckled but held it in. I think he said his thing in English for my benefit as he knew I didn’t speak Arabic. The driver hurriedly opened the door, with the look on his face that said this was his van and not some company, so he’d better do what he’s told, lest he pay the damages. As the door opened, the smell of death wafted into the desert wind for an unholy scent. My cousin lifted the sheet, facing the stench head on and wailed and it was very dramatic. If I liked him at all, I’d have felt some pity but I did not like him and felt fucking pitied out.

It was moments like these that made me regret not speaking the mother tongue so I could say, “Hey shit head! You couldn’t talk to him when he was alive? Yeah, when people die, ‘sorry’ won’t work, asshole!” or the pithier “Nice play, dickwad but he’s dead already!” I was curious if these nuances would hold up in translation.

I believe as Ali and I watched this play out we both felt the same way. Mahmoud had been with us for about a week and he was still dead. Moreover, he’d been gone for almost two weeks and what’s more, we have been doing all of the heavy lifting and I know Ali and I just wanted to be done with this shit because frankly, I was wasted tired.

But this tragedy was still fresh for these folks so we let it go. They needed closure and I knew making a scene with Eddie would make the situation worse. There was a bigger purpose than my feelings, to be sure. There is something uncannily natural about burying the dead. You don’t ever really get over loss but there is no mistaking the overwhelming sense to get on with living. We want to live.

Mahmoud and I weren’t even particularly close but I didn’t really dislike him either and yes, I would miss him. At first I was here because it was my duty or a feeble attempt at trying to be the man my dad expected me to be. But then the whole thing just got to me. I have always processed death long after the fact for some reason. I never really worried about my own death for that matter. I have had enough situations to know that wasn’t mere macho rhetoric.

I was sixteen years old and I worked at an ice cream store, in South L.A. and it was 1981. A harmless looking, black street guy came in to buy a cone. I looked down at the cash drawer as I took his money to make change. Suddenly he reached his hand into the cash! I grabbed his wrist and as I pulled him to the floor, he pulled out a gun and aimed it at my head! The gun’s make was lost on me but I backed away about six feet like I flew, with my hands up quickly. He said, in a low voice, “You dead, motherfucker!”

Oddly enough, I was calm as a cow in New Delhi and I simply thought, “This is it,” nearly overwhelmed with the peace only an “I don’t care if I die” feeling can bring.  But after a blank stare for what seemed forever, he only took the money and ran out. I calmly walked into the back where Mike was washing dishes and told him we were robbed. I even showed him the dropped ice cream cone. The idiot even had ice cream stains in the drawer with fingerprints. We called the cops.

I wasn’t upset and never got upset. To this day it doesn’t even register as anything other than an interesting thing I used to mention at parties to impress girls…

Another gust of wind kicked up some dust and my uncle took control of the situation, clearly being the patriarch of the family in these matters; he walked over to the ambulance, eyed Eddie and shut the doors with a look and nod that said, “It’s time,” gently nudging him aside. He motioned for all of us to get in the cars, “Yallah!” he said authoritatively. We headed toward my fathers’ village and followed my cousin in our grim caravan with my other uncle riding shotgun in the ambulance.

This was 1988, the height of what the Arab world called the first Intifada or uprising. I always felt like an alien space guest when heritage or what I knew about Arabs came up in conversation as a kid in the States. I wasn’t very good about anything not American or of the West. Brazil always felt better for some reason. Maybe because it was not the Middle East, I don’t know but fitting in was paramount when you’re 10 and 12. I spoke of it like it wasn’t really my background but alas, it was. I felt like I was just telling the story of another people or even recounting a movie I had seen, feeling more American than anything else. But I knew the history and dug the food and that was as feeble a connection as an adopted kid finding out that his real father was a war hero.

My dads’ family lived in the West Bank for hundreds of years before Israel became a nation. That happened in 1948 after the hideous brutality of WWII and the Holocaust. It wasn’t hard to get the U.N. Partition of 1947 turned into a mandate for the birth of a nation. At the time, like it or not, Palestine was a territory of Great Britain and not its own country. As I grew up, the Arabs always seemed to enjoy the shock in talking about the brutality of the Birth of Israel. Israelis didn’t like hearing it either but it was brutal; very American Indians being butchered by the white man sort of thing.

However, I could never find anywhere in history where a nation was birthed with cooperation and a handshake. The entire western hemisphere was ripe for this. “Sure, come on in and take us over! We’ll get a pot of tea on!” was not anything I ever saw in history books which were written by the winners. They told a certain kind of truth as we all do to fit an agenda. Is that desire to gloss over history ever absent? I did it in my most mundane conversations about everyday life all the time so why not an entire civilization when the stakes are high? Someone wins, someone loses and the winners get someone to write it down.

So we drove through the east end of the West Bank. The streets didn’t look too dissimilar from anything I have seen in Mexico or the Bahamas. Again, a lot of that half finished look with light blues, yellows, oranges and bad green or brown trim that had a tendency to not match the buildings which began with a purpose only to be left for us to guess what the fuck they were. There was no beach and I quickly noticed as in Jordan, the absence of exposed feminine flesh.

The women didn’t wear burqas but they dressed modestly with pants fitting loosely if they wore them and the sleeves were long on blouses or sweaters with no short skirts and painfully, no cleavage. Lots of women wore the embroidered traditional Arab dresses. Even the advertising screamed Islamic rule but not Sharia Law. The Israelis would never allow it. Not in the Territories. One billboard for tennis gear showed a happy couple dressed in tennis wear from the 1800’s or something. The man had on long, white pants and a long sleeved sweater and so did she. Swimwear sales were not making markets in this part of the world and I doubt there was an Arabic word for “lingerie.”

We continued on through Ramallah which was like a ghost town at this hour. It was a full thirty degrees colder too. I was told to bring clothes for the cold because it could be like Chicago at times. I almost didn’t listen, thinking, “It’s the fucking desert, man!” I’m glad I took the advice. The place was way above sea level, much higher than Amman.

Because of the conflict, the towns closed up early. Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Ramallah, all had curfews. Certain towns were open for business from ten to twelve noon, two to four, and so on. But between the curfews, a mid east version of the OK Corral complete with the student protesters showing up with rocks and the big, bad Israeli Army appearing with M-16’s, rubber bullets and riot gear. Even with the rubber bullets it still looked very “David & Goliath.” This imagery in the world media fueled as much. Liberals jumped all over the stories as it resembled the Kent State massacre, the Hippie Movement, Civil Rights, and pretty much the entire 1960s. Left leaning Europeans found something else to needle and dislike the “imperialist” U.S. for. Interestingly, it was the first time I can remember sympathy or empathy of any kind, for Arabs. Finally, albeit briefly, the terms, “animals” and “Barbarians” took a rest.

It was like Yasser Arafat went to a New York publicist, “Look, Maury, I have this image problem, see?” having adopted a Brooklyn accent. “The world thinks we’re a bunch of goons…anything but! We’re good people! People of the earth, religious people, you get the idea…but we have gotten a bad rap over this terror thing.”

“Look Y.A. (because a good publicist always uses your initials) what you need is a total concept makeover,” of course Maury is chomping a cigar as good publicists are wont to do. “There is nothing more guaranteed to piss people off than to have students getting shot...but they gotta be real now! No shipped in, professional rabble rousers you understand? None of that Al Sharpton bullshit! That leaks out and you are fucked. You read me?”

Of course, Yasser being the image whore that he is, has his concerns but is still very interested, his assistant taking notes, “Well, Maury, there have already been so many deaths and they’re just kids and…”

“They got Nixon good with this shit! Don’t you remember Kent State?” Maury puffs triumphantly, his tie lying at the top of his belly, bald head gleaming in the neon glow of his office.

“That was you?” Yasser is impressed and upon Maury’s approving nod, noticing the autographed Abbie Hoffman picture behind him, becomes ecstatic, clapping his hands, “Done! When do we start?”

Maybe it wasn’t quite that orchestrated and I doubt Arafat knew any publicists in New York that specialized in PR for protesting.

I saw a body on the side of the narrow two lane road we got on, charred beyond description. Man or woman, I really couldn’t tell but the smell of old, burnt flesh came through the car window. I asked Ali and he shrugged, “Collaborator.”

He went on to explain that a collaborator was someone, usually an Arab who for whatever reason; acceptance, ethics or lack of, money, it doesn’t matter, spied for the Israelis. Now, when the Arabs caught one, they took a tire soaked with gasoline and threw it around his neck and set it on fire. Of course, this was after he has had the ever living shit beaten out him with bats or crowbars. This tire trick was called a “necktie.” Sometimes, they’d just set him on fire after the requisite tortuous thrashing which was the real punch line to the exercise. One thing that was a constant was that they were always burned and they were always left on the side of the road, until the locals or the Israelis would pick up the mess. Made a statement. Not sure if the boys in marketing came up with that as a calling card but it was catchy, if not conflicted.

Welcome to the West Bank.

We got to the village and my uncles guide the ambulance to the mosque where the services were to be held in about two hours. The driveway was broken concrete as this place was built largely through western donations which had been re-directed out here sometime ago. Several of us lifted the stretcher out of the ambulance and moved it into a room where the local cleric was there with another guy who I believe was the preparation guy or something. Man, did Mahmoud stink. Technically, it’s a sin to leave a body unburied this long as you’re supposed to be buried as soon as humanly possible as in right the fuck now but God forgives air travel and border crossings. Religion, being a method of instruction, instructed this because people fucking stink when they’re dead!

We went to the house and ate before going to the service. I was surprised at how simple the building was. Except for some religious stuff in the front, you wouldn’t really know it was a mosque. It kind of looked like a really big, half finished tract home in California with random cement chunks in parts of the yard where plants or lawn were supposed to be. Here I see that most of my heathen family (except for Ayoub and another cousin) stood in the back with the women in the foyer. Apparently, they were as inconsistent as my dad and they didn’t even know their own prayers. I subscribe to the ideal that if one bothers to claim a faith, said one may want to have a working knowledge on how it all works. One should know their respective religions’ “dominus e pluribus unums” and that sort of thing, especially if claiming superiority is what one is into.

Now I was in back because I was not a Muslim. I was invited to pray by one of my cousins and I declined politely. I was no hypocrite or at least I tried to be as little of one as possible.

After the prayers and some cleric officiated, my cousin was carried on a nicer, religious stretcher through the village streets. There were probably about 200 people who made the 100 yard trek to the cemetery. It was an overcast day and there were people clapping, chanting with more wailing and calling to Allah for sure.

The graveyard was interesting because rich or poor, everyone pretty much had a crypt. I’m not sure but there had to be an “indigent crypt fund” or something for folks without relatives in the West. The space was pretty huge for a small village of 3,000. They slid Mahmoud into the crypt, next to the one his father was buried in. They had a big piece of land for that immediate family. The workers came out with fresh cement right away. The women stayed and bellowed, consoling his mom who was on her knees, wailing with her soft, plump hands in the air, grinding her knees and embroidered dress into the dirt. Her face was completely soaked with floods of tears that were splashing off her cheeks onto the ground like rain mixed with the spit that only grief can produce. At times I thought she was suffocating, her mouth hung open wide for long stretches working to take in air before a moan could be emitted, evolving into a banshees’ wail then she’d do it again.

I also thought I was cried out but apparently I wasn’t. I’m certain I was feeling her loss more than anything else as I was numb for a few days until that moment. Ali opened up, letting loose his sobs as he and his brothers were holding their mother with an almost instinctual precision. It was as if this act had been passed down for generations and I suppose it had, if I thought about humans being human. Even Eddie suspended the feud, the memory of which was absent here and joined in.

Culture be damned because there is no sound like that of a bereaved parent burying their child. No sound on this earth. This was her youngest boy, the baby. It’s like hearing a gun cocked in your direction or a dying child giving out its last gasp. Few sounds stop your heart like that. It made my chest hurt. This was not the first time I heard it and I would be naïve to think it would ever be the last. The world is imperfect and shit just happens and I was in the fucking Middle East where I just saw a burned up dead person.

Suddenly and with familiarity, the “I didn’t really care if I died” feeling came upon me. So there’s that.

Abe Abdelhadi hosts the Bitter Truth with Abe Abdelhadi on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, etc.