In the back of class, in front of the poster of his Highness. Daydreaming of Osama Bin Laden, strangling him, cutting his beard off and feeding it to him. Pissing in his eyes, shitting in his ears. They will sing songs for the dead but what of the survivors. The ones who lost family and friends or the ones who lost nothing. The ones who were dragged back kicking and screaming to their homelands while dirty Palestinians danced in the streets for candy-canes and lollipops.
“Meyn el manyak al jedid hatha” says the fat one and all the kids in the back laugh. An atmosphere of barbaric merriment. I can’t understand their feral grunts but I’m scared all the same.
They’re all dressed in the same navy striped uniforms except for the teacher who keeps looking at me with her big doughy eyes.
“Ledeyna taleybon jadid meyn Amreeka, esmo Mohammed Said.” says the teacher
I recognize my name amidst the gibberish, she points at me.
“Come to frront of class. Intorduce.” she says
They’re looking at me like a pack of rabid dogs, some of them already have facial hair. The mob of children turns quiet and I say something like:
“Hii, my name is Mohammed Said, I’m from New Jersey.”
“Err-err.” says the fat one and the whole class laughs.
They’re making fun of the way I stretch my r’s. My face turns red and I sit back down, despondent. For 45 minutes the teacher goes over long division in broken English. The bell rings. One of the kids comes up to me and says:
“Hello Mohammed, my name is Zaid Hamdan. Where you from?”
“I’m from New Jersey.”
“Hahahaha, no I mean where you really from?”
“New Jersey.”
“Palestine or Jordan?” he persists
“I don’t know.” I shrug
“You don’t know where you’re from? Well I’m from Palestine, Ramallah.”
“That’s nice.” I say, glad to have made a friend.
We go downstairs to the depressing play area, a concrete soccer field. The fat kid comes up to us and says to Zaid:
“Shoo Sahebet el manyak.”
Then he pushes Zaid to the floor. Zaid’s face turns red and I can see his eyes water, there’s anguish in his face, not surprise, this isn’t the first this has happened. Before I know it my hand is in the air and I can see it slap the fat boy in the face, his skin seems to vibrate for a split second and I can see the saliva flying out of his mouth. He is stunned.
Zaid gets up off the floor and waves his hands in the air.
“Why did you do that?” he whimpers. The fat boy towers over me and looks me in the eye. I stare right back.
“Doo you know who I am?” he says with an air of rusted royalty.
“No.”
“I am beny sakher, the sons of the rock, do nott duo that again or you will see what our family can do.”
***
No one bothers me on the bus-ride home. Reminds me of prison-movies. They just stare at me with a sort of morbid fascination in their brown eyes. When we get to my neighborhood I can see small green pellets hit the windows of the New English School bus. I walk out of the bus and those same green pellets start hitting me. I can hear someone screaming.
“Mohammed. Mo-hammeed.”
But I can’t tell where the voices are coming from. All the while pellets are raining on me left and right, one hits my cheek and I hear the screams once more.
“MOhammed, Mohammed.”
I run to the apartment building intercom but before I can ring the bell I hear someone running down the stairs. A dark bearded man with a balding head of hair, he looks like a walking cigarette. It’s my cousin, the godfather and he looks pissed.
“What in the fuck, MOhammed, I yelling for you from balcony. You don’t hear me.” his broken English seems to underscore his seriousness. Suddenly the pellets stop.
“No.” I squirm.
“How, HOW, Mohaameed, could you let el-manayek hathola tharrow olives on you.” his eyes are red as the pack of Marlboros in his shirt pocket.
“I..I don’t know. I was scared.” I look up at him. He laughs.
“Come, we go to supermarket.”
On our way up the hill we pass a park full of ragged looking kids playing soccer barefoot.
“You know who build park?”
“No.”
“Your grandfather, was great man.”
“What did he do?”
“Ah.. I cannot explain this.. how do you say.. he come from Palestine on a camel and he leave..he leave Jordan in limo with guards.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Yes, Mohammed.” he grumbles
“Who are the sons of the rock?”
***
As we dance down the street like dingledodies, agents of sin, whiskey in our pockets and cigarettes in our ears. Brain farts, switching personalities at the flick of a lighter. Gypsies, fuckers, freaks..Stretching our r’s and twititerrr accounts. Fondling Absolut bottles in clubs that only let couples in.
The owner is a neurosurgeon with investments in nightclubs, liquor stores, gas stations, mobile whores, Oprah queens, rent a car’s and upscale bars. His son’s an acquaintance with one of those family names that you str---etch the syll--ables of. New English schools and French-American communities. The fringes. Where everything evens out, Tipsy girls with dyed blonde hair and loose legs call to me.
Dripping gin and cheap vodka, we stumble across Abdoun. Dancing, dressed in black at an all white party. Grinding against a barefoot girl in a white dress. Some skinny amateur drunk has too many jello-shots in the VIP room, alcohol poisoning, drowning in vomit, convulsing to the beat. Lili removes her ass. Insists on taking her to the hospital. Maybe I can gypsy Lili back to my basement afterwards. I call my Arab friends, because I need help.
The Knight arrives in a beat-down orange Opal, we carry skinny girl to the hospital. They put tubes in her and pump the poisons out, she looks cold and pale, worn out. She was so eager to please, arms shaved, mustache waxed, hands on my back as we skipped down the street. The Knight takes us all back to my place, we cannot think of anywhere else to go. The Knight’s eyes glow everytime he looks at Lady Gaga. We contemplate in my balcony.
The Godfather leaps to light Lili’s cigarette, blonde deficiency disorder, a common ailment in my neighborhood. Little does he know it’s dyed. I talk with the Godfather, forgetting I speak Engleyzey, back to Arabic. English seems so dated in his presence, as if it cannot properly transmute our garaf (disgust). The Knight valiantly offers to take Lili home. He’d give her his left testicle in pink gift-wrap.
The entire time my relatives stare down from their balconies on the upper floors, awed at my audacity, bringing a girl in a tall red heels home a week before Ramadan,
We decide not to venture anywhere else and the Godfather treats us all to Abu-Hijleh Snack. For some reason when he calls, they have a delivery service. Whenever I call the driver’s always on break. The Godfather is always rescuing me. Even when I mess up, when I shit where I eat. He scoops it right up. I hope I am not a disappointment to him. He taught me Arabic, gave me money to take girls out, taught me about confidence, I don’t know where I’d be if he didn’t have faith in me. The Knight and the Godfather go home. Now it’s just Lady Gaga and Pierre. Making out behind my back while I light a cigarette. Pierre’s grown over the years. He’s practically an Arab now. Now his reputation pushes him out of the way. Girls seem to fall into his arms. But not tonight. Lili’s just his backup plan. I would suck her toes.
Lili gets off the couch Dylan’s sleeping on and interrupts my reveries, she snorts something. I’m not sure if she’s even bothering to be discreet.
“What is that?” I ask
“Xanax.”
We’ve lost our innocence. I remember when Dylan got slapped in the face all those years ago. He was shaking and tearing up. I had a bottle of gin in my jacket. And I ran upstairs to their Hummer and yelled “Kos Omak.”. Then my face was against the Hummer’s windshield. He punched me in the nose and ripped my glasses off.
“His mom’s dead you asshole.” he said.
I got off the car and called the Godfather but he got lost on the way. The man who’d beat me up came up to me with my glasses, kissed me on the cheeks and said:
“You have balls.”
The Godfather shows up in a green minibus full of hairy, scary Arabs from the Ha’ara (neighborhood).
That’s when I realized I worshipped Pierre, lived vicariously through him and anyone who would spit on my hero should be lashed. Twenty times.
Which reminds me, Ramadan has begun. No more discounts at the liquor store. No more paying the Egyptian five JD to lock the roof door. No more calling the Godfather in the middle of the night. No more hashish hidden in hookah chambers. No more of the Godfather hitting me with his stick. We are holy now. Our sins squarely hidden in the lining of our pockets. The godfather yells at me every time I light a cigarette in the street, cab drivers curse and honk at me. “I have a medical condition” I scream after them. Hashem used to tell me “we are the apples that fell from the tree”. I think he might have fallen but I flew away. He rotted in the dirt while I traveled through the stratosphere, higher than the Empire State.
Last Ramadan I had just returned to Jordan after being expelled from Oakvale College and being arrested for drug possession. Hashem had failed his first year as a medical student. We drowned ourselves in cheap liquor. Hashems parents were gone, his dad hid the cartons of Petra beer behind a double locked metal door and we picked at it with toothbrushes and hairpins to no avail. It was the godfather who found the liquor cabinet. Liters of shining Black Label, bubbly champagne, tequila with worms in it but no vodka strangely. No matter, we guzzled it like the thirsty in the desert. During tequila night the godfather fell in love with the slut.
It wasn’t just that she was too young for him, they came from entirely different generations. Like when we we were in the car when it flipped over and an olive tree got caught in the sunroof and the godfather thought he died and the slut said lets take another ride. When Hashem's parents came back he told them that he had drank all the booze and the sluts parents sent her to rehab.
As Hashem draws my face for the website that would save the world we watch the Ramadan moon beckon on us. Lili comes downstairs and hands me vial of blood, she looks at me earnestly.
“That’s my egg. Hashem has one, I think you should have one too.”
***
Personally I’ve never bought alcohol during Ramadan. That would be illegal. Like many young substance abusers with no domestic storage units, I suffer in silence, using Ramadan as a convenient rehabilitation period. However, someone who isn’t me, went on an arduous quest for alcoholic beverages of any variety yesterday night. This individual told me: “I felt like I was picking up drugs. I spent longer buying the booze than drinking it.” And I replied: “You deserve it, you grimy scumbag, drinking during an Islamic holy month, I spit on thee with my annual religious conviction.”
“Some guy meets you by the car outside the liquor store, you tell him what you want, he writes it down on a piece of paper and you give him the money, he runs inside, comes back with another piece of paper with directions on it, we took one right, two lefts and one more right then U-turned into a deserted dirt parking lot. Then we waited. It seemed like forever. But eventually a car came, it didn’t even have lights on, someone handed us a black plastic bag through a window and they just drove off. Thank God, it was all there.” He looked at me with his calm blue-eyes, I can sense his relief. “The whiskey smelled like honey-nectar. We drove around looking for somewhere secluded to drink it. We mixed it into a big Pepsi bottle and disposed of the liquor bottles to be extra careful. It was difficult but satisfying.” “Hmm. Corrupter of pure souls. Honey-nectar, you say? Where is this place?”
“Don’t bother I went by today and they were closed, I guess they only open every once in a while”
I am sleepless and sober, as I wait patiently for Sohor and my daily ration of food, water and cigarettes. I think about her and the way she said:
“Why didn’t you kiss me?”
Andy Warhol believed that fantasy was always better than reality. Maybe that’s why I’m so happy with her living in my head. I know she’s not thinking about me, she’s too busy
dancing and singing, writing plays and sleeping on couches in Barcelona.
I remember when we were at the edge of the forest and I realized I was too sober to be dancing in the woods. Hashem, hashem was drunk. And she, she didn’t even have that problem. She comes here to stare at the sunset by herself. I’m more the type who only wanders into the outdoors on or in search of altered states. And so I call the Rapper:
“Mhamad, you’re on speaker I’m at the veterinarians, tell him how the horse is.”
“The horse?”
“Yes Mhamad, the horse!”
“The horse fell.”
“You hear that doctor? The horse fell. I’ll see you soon Mhamad. Take care of the horse while I’m gone”
We climb out of Hashem’s 93’ Saab and her broad smile fills me with joy. I watch her bubbly ass as she climbs up the dirt hill into the pine-trees. I run up after her and Hashem trudges up the hill with a six-pack of Petra in hand. Cause we are so young. We’d spent the night before at Lili’s house and I’d had Hashem sketch my face for the website that would save the world and allow the freaks to take over. I’m paranoid that the Mukhabarat were tracking me. Hiding in pine-trees and tracing my IP’s and putting my name on lists. The dirt feels nice on my bare feet. I grab a beer from Hashem’s six-pack and he gives me a look of hatred.
“Jahama, you know what the Godfather said.”
“I only want a sip.”
Petra tastes like piss and benzene. I’m surprised she drinks it.
“So are you gonna send me those photos for freaks of arabia”
“Yeah sure” she says, studying Hashem
“You’re gorgeous.” she says to him
And he is. Broad shoulders, blue-eyes, forearms the size of tree trunks.
“Why don’t you and Jahama go out?” he grumbles. I blush like a schoolgirl.
“I don’t think Jahama’s really my type” she says.
I hear Nizar’s Range Rover rumbling in the distance. I take another sip of beer and light a dunhill. The forest really is beautiful. I’ve only recently started appreciating nature. Psychedelics and humping trees and dancing erratically. Nizar arrives with a vial of white powder, looking pleased with himself. Hashem and I do lines off the filter of Nizar’s parliament.
“Tala, lets climb a tree”
I am on top of the tree when the horse tranquilizer hits. Tala is sitting on the branch next to me. Hashem is caressing Nizar’s pistol. His sky eyes dance on the shininess of the gun. They are shooting the gun and my feet are covered in pine-sap. I am a boy in a land full of men.
I misremember when I was on horse tranquilizer. My friend had to tell me what I said. I told you you were my soulmate and you laughed in my face. I’m glad I don’t remember that. I didn’t kiss you cause I didn’t have the balls. I didn’t kiss you because I was too busy trying to save the world while the world shrugged its shoulders.
I remember when we were in the forest, climbing pine-trees and I suddenly got up and ran through the woodland, stood on a rock and stared at the sunset, screaming obscenities, daring Allah to shoot me down. And he would, he would.
***
I go to the club everyone’s talking about and suddenly Jordan seems like its changed. Girls dressed in a dizzying medley of short skirts and rainbow heels. And they’re Arabs. An Arab girl invited me here, a Palestinian, [not like me], a real one — she lives in Ramallah instead of fondly pretending to remember it.
I see her, lips and toenails painted red to match her dress, not much left to the imagination, an ass that makes you believe in Allah. I would lick her clean. Shaking her hips, the dance-ring queen, she spills herself all on the techni-colored floor. 51, full of aliens, I can't handle it, too much! Thankfully I haven't paid the cover-charge, I run to vistas and smelly roofs and Petra beer, no entrance fee. In my Jordan no self-respecting Arab girl lets you bask in the crimson gardens of her virginity. That’s for her husband, the knight in shiny armor.
Slightly stoned, I am swinging back and forth on Shoegazer’s roof staring at Old Amman, waving her goodbye. Like Beirut she is being reclaimed by artists, homosexuals, expatriates and other undesirables. But the forces of reputability are still holding on strong, bored twenty-something males jeering at every girl and freak who passes by. I don’t know who the blonde girl sitting next to me is, but her sea green eyes and her Dutch accent remind me: Eva.
I like arguing with her; it’s cute the way she pronounces words. Words like goals and dreams and ambitions. She wants to save the world, with that button-nose and thin lips, smiling, contagious. We’re all full of laughter drawing arrows in the stars; I wonder how long this Jordanian stuff lasts.
“I’m so glad I met you, everyone I’ve met in Jordan is fake,” she says with an air of finality.
“That’s because you hang out with the rich Jordanians,” I’m saying. “They have no ideals or religion to live on, so they buy things and do things just to look better than the other rich Jordanians. It’s a very competitive culture. Everything’s a fad.”
I pause a moment. “Jordan’s still real, Eva, you just don’t know where to go.”
“I went to 51 and the girls I was with said I should wear a shorter dress,” she says. “I was surprised girls are like that in the Middle East.”
So am I, Eva. But I can’t let you know that. No, I must appear to be an expert on this schism of time and place — it’s where I grew up, after all.
Tribal rivalries, pouring coffee in Bedouin tents, exchanging honor for monetary payment, hoping they’ll throw in some hash. Women who cling to their hijabs while their daughters wear the shortest skirt at the club. No one understands it. It’s a fucking miracle that this walking contradiction of a country is semi-functional. The police are an armed gang sponsored by the government and they'll arrest you if you have the wrong last name. Go outside Amman, to Madaba and you can watch schoolchildren burning down police stations. They don’t need a police force down there; they find the very prospect of one insulting. They have their own justice system; blood and honor.
I feel an indecipherable dark energy, I can still feel it hours later as Eva and I hunt for a taxi. It reminds me of the last time I cried, a feeling of utter helplessness. Bigger men screaming insults at you, sweating, texting frantically on my phone.
“Look at that faggot in the orange sunglasses.”
“We’ll carve his face open.”
I wish I had the balls to call them out but I am waiting for backup and everyone seems to be ignoring me. As they’re walking out I say to one of them:
“Fuck your honor.”
“What- are you talking to me.”
“You heard me.”
But they did nothing, just walked out. Then the Godfather showed up and I was in tears, hysterics.
“Amman’s a bad town for psychedelic drugs — negative energy everywhere,” I say. I see it in the security guards patrolling an embassy. In the unhappy men sitting on sidewalks and benches, meowing at Eva.
“You mean like Ecstasy? I like Ecstasy,” she says, licking her lips.
I like Eva. My arm feels comfortable around her, too comfortable. That’s her problem — Eva seems perfectly calm in her own bubble.
I want to break it. I want to shriek so loud her ears bleed. I want to sing a song so ugly it shatters her. Leave her in the fetal position, crying, her hair turned white. How can I show her the humiliation? The wide vistas and dilapidated buildings, the alleys where we drank 7-Up and gin, the streets we loitered on, the little coffee-carts, the gun-shots, the protests, the stolen dinars, the weddings, the Abu-hejleh snack demolished to build a starbucks, the refugee camps, the smiling hopeless, lower and lower until the pressure makes your ears explode.
I went to the mosque yesterday, the calm cool night of fate, it was a spectacle with cameras and bad sound systems and makeshift tents for the Arabs too lazy to camp-out inside the mosque itself, it had a valet service, even cute little head-scarved girls for ladies who don't touch a strange man's hand. Life’s too short to be pissed off all the time. To be constantly thinking of hell, its bad psychology.
My dad, ever condescending:
"When are we gonna solve your situation?"
Islam is as disgusting and smelly as many other ideologies. No better or worse. Piles of feces ripping themselves apart. The neighborhood streets are drug-addicts. Acid-heads hiding under a guise of alcohol abuse. Genius. Problems. Like myself. Walking disappointments waiting to happen.
I am an inhabitant of the underworld, inevitably worthless. An enemy. Suspicious desert weaponry. In touch with nature (gasp). There are people I hate more then my father issues. The ones that can’t tell you why Allah? Its become a part of them, they know it and nothing else. By allah mr hashem wants some acid, grinning at me like hyenas. No longer afraid to live a life that I've made in song. I've been too dumb to dream all along.
Like the doctor said: "clinically depressed 51% of the time". Too many existential crises’ to buy anything real. I can finally see them clearly, staring at my rearview with Hashem driving. I feel like I've been his passenger all along and he still hasn't quite let me out of the car. There've been beautiful sights but lots of excrement, sewers everywhere. Fuckers never even bothered wiping. Our world and they've created it. The spastic majority too tasteless to ever tell shit from gold. Too often the freaks are silent while everyone else screams. Perhaps words are unnecessary.
But I'm too sentimental. I neeed to fight for what I believe is god. I'm too broken to be fixed, incapable of faith. I say I love everyone but it is a lie. Oftentimes I look at people and all I see is horseshit, no flowers, raw fertilizer. Too many people act like they've been discarded. Escape is all they can think about. Too ADD to see the beauty of their reality, to understand its worth trying to improve. Apathy is all i see. No one really cares about any of their beliefs, any of their drugs, it can all be sold, capitalist economy. Sometimes my twenty-year old ass posits that humanity is losing itself. The truth is the only way to gain anything real is to lose yourself in all directions. One day when all their hastily erected symbols lose their electricity. We will sit around a tree together, with our vices and our blessings, no headscarves on, bare feet, conscious that we have nothing to lose, knowing death is too close round the corner to ever take life seriously. And it will be beautiful as the shining rain after dancing for hours. Words are unnecessary and sadly, too dull.
I have a strong desire not to be responsible for my own life. I’d like to believe someone else did it. All my hallucinations follow the same pattern, someone, an outside force intervenes on my behalf and conveniently takes control of my life. Revealing all the accidents and coincidences to have been planned. Everything is as it should be and soon my destiny will be revealed. They watch me. They pay attention to me. Care about me. Caress my insecurities. It takes one to know one.
That’s why I write. Self-immolation. The words are necessary. Mine all mine, you are under my thumb. Alone, he flounders on. Need to stop victimizing myself. Part of my illness is that I see my life as a series of transitions between me being alone. I am peeling myself apart for you. I should be sacrificing myself for the people who love me but I am useless. Haha look at this guy, “little boy lost he takes himself so seriously, he brags of his misery he likes to live dangerously” People tell me my writing is dark. I apologize if I seem grotesque but don’t you realize I’m broken?
Once upon a time I was much better. I used to dance through life and it was all so easy. I didn’t feel the need to record passing moments.
I am staring at the wall, thinking of things that exist only in my head, microphones and cameras. When the pregnant lady asks:
“Are you gay? You seem like a flamer.”
“No I’ve been trying to be gay all my life but it’s never worked out for me.”
“You’re like my friend he’s not gay he just has tendencies.”
“He’s not gay he’s just neurotic.”
“What are you on right now?”
“Xanax, a little 2CI, alcohol, klonopin, pot, spice.”
I desperately want to be a tragedy. Sincerely want it to be true.
I feel marked, singled out for some special form of suffering. Why? Because I can take it. Kids used to punch me in the arm when I was in junior high and I wouldn’t wince. I used to wrestle and no one could get me to the ground. Jesting infinitely, deranged and witty marble , piano-slender fingers glide across the keys, I wish I could play music.
But no, no one’s devised this for me. This is all my own doing. I love that moment when the curtains open and there you are sitting in an armchair saxophone, stuck, unable to make a sound, full of compressed air. And the crowd goes “Poo-too-tweet.”. Eyeballs drill into you. And it feels good, vile. Like a girl tickling your asshole.
Their sound systems are incredible I remember when they used to blast the call to prayer at five in the morning, an old atheist filed a noise complaint, I would blast AC/DC right back. In other words this is an introduction, a distant past that I need to get off. “The reason my insides are so swollen is cause I spent too much time ghosting”. It scratches at me and my shoulders ache from carrying this shit around. This is my last ghost.
I’m slowly coming to terms with what I am, the godfather told me “you will meet us soon”. As if I have sinister secrets lurking in the background, guns and drugs disguised as portable toilets and pomegranate. I’ve seen the needle marks on his arms, his tired veins, the way they used to drink vodka out of plastic water bottles and smoke hashish in the mother of all storms. Hashish straight from the camel’s asshole, my cousins would watch the smugglers pull the strings till the hash brick popped out of the anus, straight, uncut. Never take a small hit is what they might say.
"Whe-re you from?" he grumbles, spitting on the pavement, his mustache does situps. I knew this question was coming. It’s always lurking, doing silent jumping jacks in my mind, I wait for it, like a snake charmer anticipates the drawing of the fangs. I wonder where I'll be from this time, dancing with a horseshoe, he looks like a Salti with his pointy eyebrows or maybe a Ma'ani.
Hashem’s ocean eyes well with pride, his chest bubbles up, truckload shoulders revving. I am amused. "Jerasulem" he says
I hesitate and the cold of Hashem makes me shiver. What he doesn’t know is I’ve never answered this question honestly. I take a look at who’s asking me, study their facial features, learn the rhythms of their accent and try to give them the answer they want to hear; a Jordanian village close to their own. Salivating, eager to please. But I can’t let Hashem know that I wag, betray my family, my blood, my kin, my honor, my name, my life, my death, bite the hand that feeds me on a regular basis. So I tell the truth, exteeeeeending the sylllllllables of my last name to make it sound as regaaaaal as possible.
“S-a-i-d, of Be’er El Sabee’” the village I come from is literally ‘the well of lions’. My ancestors found lions in the deserts of Southern Palestine.
After a couple of young Sabawees were eaten, they formed a sneaky plan, they lured the lions into a well and for years their roars ricocheted through the village. Today if you stand on the right dune in the sand you can hear the ghosts of their echoes. Whiteboy Hashem is from Jerusalem which is always a great bet especially if you’re talking to a fellow Palestinian. Jerusalem is cosmopolitan and pious, a divine city taken over by the Zionist cockhoppers. Be’er El Sabee is not so sanctimonious; some would say it’s a den of thieves full of low morals and highwaymen, arms dealers and opium addicts. Some say my Bedouin ancestors used to pick valuables off the bodies of dead refugees; others have the nerve to tell me that the Sabawees were Zionist spies during ‘48.
Despite my reservations I tell the truth trying to make the world hear me squeak: "Beer El Sabee'." I say. Hashem has already revealed us as Palestinian scum so there's no point in lying.
"Which tribe?" asks the officer who likes to stuff his fat Jordanian nose into things. I say Jordanian because even if he is Palestinian I doubt he’ll admit it. I like to hold people to the same standard I hold my own family. My grandfather changed our last name when he became minister of culture. He wanted it to sound more authentically Jordanian, hairy and brown. A dark cloud too stubborn to rain, that’s what it means. They should carve mountains in his memory. Instead they put a fatwa out on him. Gotta love the brotherhood.
"Tarabeen." I whisper. He gives me a look of condescension his moustache pointing downward.
"You're a Torbani?"
The Tarabeen are possibly one of the largest Bedouin tribes in the world.With my light skin, necklace, afro and conspicuous lack of facial hair. It’s hard to believe that I’m a member of those Tarabeen, the ones who conquered the Ajarme, the ones who smuggle guns and food and cars through the tunnels to Gaza, the ones who are tough and resilient. The ones who will throw sand in your face during a fight and proceed to humiliate you. The ones who kill for and die for silly words like loyalty and honor.
I nod.
Hashem calls the Godfather, he is mumbling on the phone.
“Yes I have their names, no I don’t have their badge numbers, I’m getting the licence plate numbers now..4, 6.”
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” they scream in unison, the superior tone is gone, all that’s left is blind anger. “Get off the phone!” one of them shoves Hashem’s tree-trunk forearm, Hashem pushes him and he falls to the floor, flailing his legs like a fish out of water. The other cop moves to grab me but Hashem pushes him out of the way. “Let him go!” he bellows. I feel like a damsel in distress. Hashem is drunk, he should be calling his ex-girlfriend, leaving her lengthy voicemails, begging her to pick-up. Or alone, crying in the shower. I should be masturbating to Jenna Jameson on my creaking bed.
The cops look at each other and pull out their night-sticks. “Alright let’s go, we’re charging you guys with assault on a police officer, public drunkenness and larceny, now get in the car before I put you in the car.” Waving their nightsticks threateningly. We climb inside the police car.
The cab-driver yells “When are we gonna get this over, they took my money, I want it back, I’m going to miss morning prayers.”
Hashem leaps out of the police car, in a flash he is in front of the cab driver. “Please, please, forgive me.” The cab driver looks down at Hashem, clearly he is enjoying this. A pretty blonde boy on his knees in front of him. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry I made you miss morning prayers. May Allah forgive me.” Fucking Hashem. Five in the morning on a weekday and there he is in the middle of a residential street, stinking of Petra beer, screaming about Allah. It’s a wonder he hasn’t woken the entire neighborhood.
Hashem and I speak fast-paced English on our way to the police station.“Don’t worry we’ll get them. I have their names” he stutters. Surely Hashem can’t believe in retaliation. They are police officers they’ll leave us with a nightstick up our ass. Make us sit on jagged edges of broken soda cans until our assholes are mangled and bloody. The only ones above them are the secret police. Spooks. The Mukhabaraat. Dark, scary figures, hiding in potted plants and bushes, waiting for you to light a joint. One time I was getting my haircut at Shakib’s and his assistant-boy told him there were some creepy looking men hanging around the corner. Shakib quietly finished cutting my hair then calm as a cancer patient walks outside and starts running. I hear a gunshot and screams and I never saw him again.
The suns coming up bathing the outside in gold. They throw us in a small cage that smells of piss, cigarette smoke, gorilla vomit and raw shit.
"Can I smoke?" Hashem says taking a bent-up Winston from his pocket
"No. What school do you go to?" says one of the officers
We tell them. They laugh, sinister-like.
"The English School. AAAhhh. iff-affs." iffaff is a term meant to describe the general lack of manliness in private school kids. Kids who drive daddy’s BMW around West Amman and drink StarBucks coffee with their pinkies pointed out. Kids who hang out in Abdoun and buy exotic soup at Casper’s. I wish I was one of them. It takes one to know one.
We stew in the cage for what seems like days. I start wishing I was back in my laundry basket, not so willing to entertain a nutcase at three am. Life seems so simple when seen through bars. This is the logical conclusion.
The Godfather arrives and they let us out. If Hashem's voice is like concrete then the Godfather’s is like granite. It lightly cuts into you, scratching at your insecurities. His voice seems to project past his short frame, his beady eyes scan the room and I know he sees right through me. The Godfather is like our guardian angel, he can make Amman walk in a straight line. With his beard and his bald head, he knows everyone there is to know. And he loves me and I don’t know how to repay that kind of love.
"You two fuckers. I had to wake up at 4:30 in the morning to pay twenty JD's to get you two fuckers out of jail. I should've left you in there."
And in his sound of sighing, I can hear his quiet insanity rumbling and his Torbani blood lightly boiling.
“Don’t worry we’ll get them. I have their last names.” exhaling red smoke.
In the mother of all storms, I felt cleansed, back to where I belong, A boy sitting in the backseat while the men do the driving.
“You look like you're in a retirement home." she says with venom in her voice. The acidity wakes me from my daydreams. We are deep in the demon's abdomen and it is achingly beautiful, trees run for miles, green grass, orange leaves. There’s an artificial lake chock-full of misery, the kids who tried to drown themselves. I can hear them wailing in the waves during the crisp night time. I can hear lots of things come nighttime, drunken jubilation, voices slithering around me, the hobo in the forest snoring, the silence in the piercing wind. But right now all I can hear is the venom in her voice, dripping while my sanity screams. Here we are in one of the most exclusive places on Earth, 50k a year, khakis and baby blue polos, resources and facilities galore, girls with apricot flesh and raspberry lips. Girls like her with sea green eyes and blonde hair flowing across milk-white breasts. Freckles dotting her shoulder. Stoned in her boyfriend's dorm room singing children's songs while he looks on in disapproval. And venom in her voice. Where did she get that venom, with her episcopalian private school and her investment banker father, suburban Pennsylvania and farms in Wisconsin where did she get the authority to tell me I'm not cool.
"I'd rather be in a retirement home" I mumble as if I had a choice.
I can’t afford to alienate her, she is the only friend I have left. All my old friends turned to ghosts, went to England and lived together in close quarters, had drinking competitions with homeless men and changed their accents.
We walk down to the gazebo and talk about drugs.
"Have you ever done ecstasy?" she asks while lighting the bowl shaped like a glass elephant.
"Yes." I lie. I have to be an authority on something. Demonstrate my value.
"We should do ecstasy together." she says. After claiming I stalked her to get her phone number, after ignoring my texts, she’s just playing games, back and forth we go, I don’t have the patience for this.
"But if we do ecstasy together we'll have sex" I snicker with a crooked grin on my face, picturing her naked, on top of me, pink nipples in my face with a hand inside her starbucks. Warmth.
"So what if we have sex?" she says, extending her syllables so they tease me just right. Typical of an Oakvale girl to act like sex is nothing. Sex would bring her down to my level. Down to the demon’s core where nothing grows. There are so many layers separating me from her. With a beautiful girl and I’ve never been so alone.
That's all I remember about Oakvale College, swallowing the venom in her words. Walking around at night stoned, blazed, abused, listening to ghosts. Infatuated with phantoms and voices in my head. I had no one to tell me I was in psychosis.
Two years later and I still have no idea. I met up with her in New York City and we frolicked around Soho and danced through Central Park and I dry-humped her desperately on a real estate agent’s futon. For those few days we were obsessed with each other, we burned like candles when the power’s out and everytime we touched I felt a spark of electricity. I’m glad she had to leave cause it never would’ve lasted, I would’ve disintegrated anyway.
***
Like when he says: "Hamed you're a manic depressive"
I am typing at the keyboard wildly, writing the gypsy manifesto for all and sundry when he pulls a clear glass bong out of his laptop bag, now he has my full attention. The proletariat can wait.
"Hamed you're manic, like electroboy"
I wonder who electroboy is. Sounds like an ironic superhero, a pikachu on steroids, a subhuman dynamo with a penchant for stupidity, zapping at everything in sight, burning cigarette holes in the carpet, leaving coffee stains on the windows, abusing authority, drinking the dirt that comes off drug paraphernalia, climbing up the walls at the speed of electricity searing obscene quotations into the ceiling.
"Where'd you get that" I ask, pointing to the bong.
"I got it from the Demon, it'll calm you down" he says with a stolid expression on his face.
There are books piled into boxes all over the room, suitcases of clothes and pixie dust i picked off the floor, I am preparing to run away and live in the trip-cave. But he clearly has other ideas, I can entertain him for now, the manifesto is nearly complete.
"Take an Allah hit" he says
I oblige and my head spins, I cough out a lung, I can see it dancing back and forth on the floor, zigzagging around, running away from me, I catch the slipperiness in my hands, pack it into the bong and light it.
"What are you smoking?" he shakes his head.
"Seeds of knowledge" I say
I plant them regularly. Pages torn from books buried all over the apartment complex. Each one leads to all the others. Socks strewn across Manhattan, Vans shoes, Armani suits littering parking complexes, necklaces left around bushes, bracelets on subway seats. A naked man-child with a garbage bag draped around his neck runs up and down the street yelling at doormen about how everything is a quest. The police take him and tell him he should be the Riddler for Halloween.
"You need to sleep" he says
"Do you remember the lake?"
I remember the lake, I plant seeds there all the time. But somehow it doesn't have the magic it had on that sugar cubed night. When we rode longboards down the steepest hills we could find. The lights shining on the lake just right, like rainbows in the night and it was so beautiful we just stood there and we cried. Then he ran into the forest cackling like the mad queen of wonderland.
"Hamed you need to sleep" he says
" I need to jerk off my testicles are tired from writing the manifesto"
I'm not sure when he left or when the world unraveled. But when it does there are red and blue and green lights dancing on the walls. Passion Pit is playing cuddle fuddle in my head, life finally has background music. People talk about me, conversations overlap, sunny, unclear, distilled daydreams, panties drop, women scream: he's a genius. She is dancing circles in her white dress, spotlights glinting off her toes. My best friend pokes his blue eyes out from the corner. I babble on the phone words pouring out like cars on a racetrack. My sister is crying. I am on the phone with my dad.
"I want to be like my grandfather, my grandfather, like my grandfather, I want to be like him"
***
Keats' autumn in plastic urns, odes to a see-through genocide, ashy faces, purple eyes You could not imagine flame! Nothing and everything spits in unison, choas in pink purses, and two large turds swimming through the dead sea And you! a schizoaffective rainbow, dancing to nothing and...”desolation row” The loneliest tempations are the saddest characters in the crowd??? Mindless muttering of marmalade sandwiches, madness reigns Supreme. trapped by her barbwire leash socks like kevlar armor. You don't know what you might catch here. Maybe you'll slip and lose a part of you to the stream, then scream and scream but you're only a minor disturbance in our ambiendreams. It leaves you permanently bitter, lobotomized, scared, lonely swimming in lost dreams and cigarette ash.
I wake up in a daze. Everything is white. The air is metallic. For a while I lay there thinking I’m dead. I can’t remember anything. I know Hashem called me. He would know what to do right now. For some reason he hung up. No matter. My name is Mohammed. I know who I am. They have taken the laces off my shoes. Enough of the days of ceaseless wandering round white hallways, stumbling into the walls and screaming obscenities at Allah. Whenever I would scream everyone else would join in. And at night I can hear them and I wonder if it’s real. I’m dressed in a hospital gown, the nurse comes in as I’m touching my cock, making sure it’s there.
“He’s awake, call his parents” she says in that tone of voice that nurses have
“No, NO, don’t” I doth protest but she’s already left the room.
What am I going to say to my parents? “I’m sorry I’m crazy. I’m sorry about the whiskey and the pills and the LSD, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry”
“Your parents are on the phone” she says
I lay in bed and pretend to sleep. Finally she leaves. There is a children’s coloring book next to my bed. Apparently I’ve been spending my time coloring in pictures of spongebob, quite splendidly I must say. The pale nurse comes back.
“Time for food.” she drones.
Famished, the sterilized hospital food tastes delicious and I have second helpings. Everyone around me is either talking to themselves or staring intently at some spot on the wall like there’s a secret I don’t know about. The man sitting next to me eats or I guess drinks his food through a straw.
“Klonopin, seventy pills.” he says as if this is obvious for all to see, clear as day, klonopin, long-acting benzodiazepine, has the same effect on your brain as alcohol but slower. His neck is bent at a strange angle and I can’t help but stare at it.
“Neck tumor. They won’t let me out to get it fixed, I need botox.” His voice crackles, this man is a liar and a thief, he would strangle his mother for a hit, I’m not sure how I know all this. It takes one to know one.
I slowly edge to another table where a tall bearded black man is reading a fat book and mumbling to himself. He looks like the Nation of Islam. He eyes me up and down and I am too tired to break eye contact.
“Hello, I’m Dwayne I used to be a basketball player.” somehow he strikes me as far less intimidating than the man with the bent neck. I like readers. It takes one to know one.
“What are you reading, Dwayne?” I say
“Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace, he had bipolar disorder, he hung himself.” he says this all in quick succession without taking his eyes off the page.
A bell ripples through the room.
“It’s time for group.” he says folding a page in infinite jest and getting up.
We go to a large circular room with drawings hanging on the walls, patient’s artwork, creative therapy. Someone is watching Spongebob on the TV with the volume down. We all sit down. Infinite jest, silence, a heavy-set man in a brown cardigan stares down his horn-rimmed glasses.
“Hello, everyone my name is Mr. Jones and for those new here you will be seeing me everyday for group therapy. If you are not here it will jeopardize your chances of discharge.”
His voice sounds like an audiobook, soothing, perfectly calm, the patients are jittery and mumbling, something is happening here and he doesn’t know what it is. I see only four others here, the man with the neck tumor, the basketball player, a girl who is clearly depressed and a man who is sobbing.
“Now we are going to go around the room and introduce ourselves say why we are here then we are going to tell a story from our past, Lionel you go first.”
He stops crying momentarily, through tears he sniffles:
“My name is Lionel, I’m here because I’m bipolar one time I went to the army for six weeks in 1972, I want to go to the long-term ward.”
I can’t describe the sadness in his voice, it could’ve put a city to a standstill. Paused permenantly. So this is where they put them. The refurbished products of society, the one’s who just couldn’t manage, could never met expectations, the ones who collapse. This is where I belong? It takes one to know one
“My name is Mary, my dad has pulmonary cancer and he got fired from his job as a security guard, he lives in his car. I have no place to go so I’m staying here. My ex-husband used to beat me, that’s why my face looks like this. I’ve been institutionalized since I was ten years old. My mom wanted to sign me off to the state. But my dad wouldn’t do it. That’s why he divorced her. I hit a deer with my car a few weeks ago and that’s when it all broke down.”
I can’t see anything wrong with her face but I want to hold her and whisper in her how all the suffering is over.
“My name is David, I like crack, I’m on a lot of painkillers right now for my neck, I bet I’m the only one here paying full flight, charity care fuckers.” he sneers, I was right.
“My name is Dwayne, I’m here because I punched a security guard. One time I tried out for the Knicks but I wasn’t tall enough. I live on Social Security and read a lot of books.”
It’s my turn but I have nothing to say
“What’s your name?” asks Mr. Jones
“My name is Mohammed but I prefer to go by Mo, I don’t know why I’m here, I kind of just went crazy. I’m from Jordan, one time I went to jail there, that’s what this reminds me of, except that wasn’t as bad because I had my best friend with me.”
Another bell rings.
“Time for medication” says Mr.Jones
I stand in line and wait for my turn. There’s a computer screen with my name on it
“Diagnosis: Bipolar 1 Meds: Lithium 900mg”
The pharmacist hands me a cup of some irradiated looking liquid and tells me to drink it.
Bells ring, days go by, infinity goes up on trail. I sleep in the clouds, numb, gray, nothing, infinite jest, apathy, I want to die.
“How about you Mo have you ever been in love with a girl?” asks Mr. Jones
“One time, this girl said to me:
“I love you”
Like when we were in that dingy kitchen, she was in her sister’s nightgown with the moonlight glinting off her pale feet and flowers in her hair. And I wanted to say “Did it hurt when you fell from heaven with those paradise eyes?”. But I don’t say corny things. Allergic. Or when her father kicked her out of the house and it was my first day in Jordan. We met up in the back of the Irish Pub. Her sister was standing next to her bags, crying. She was in the bathroom sniffing ethyl chloride. I licked it off her nose and lips. Then they took us to the middle of nowhere and we played the freeze game in the cool darkness, I tried to kiss her but she wouldn’t. And I wondered if she was embarrassed of me in front of them. We went to the park and ate candy her sister bought with the money she stole from her dad. That night we rented that smelly apartment with the empty vodka bottles in the dingy kitchen. And I wanted to carry her in that nightgown and rip it off her on that syphilis-infested mattress but I didn’t have the balls. On her last night in Jordan I left the pothead and her sister locked in the balcony and we went to the roof where I reached inside her and found out she was lying. She fucked him even though she barely knew him. And I figured out why her Dad had kicked her to the curb. And I remembered why I don’t say corny things.
“And I said, I adore you too”
The bell rang
“Bedtime”
On our way down the hall Dwayne walks up to me:
“That my man is classic. Do you smoke cigarettes?”
“I’m sick in the head of course I smoke cigarettes.”
“I got some cigarettes, wait till everyones asleep then come to my room, I’m right across the hall from you.”
I count the minutes till midnight then creep towards Dwayne’s room he’s standing in the bathroom waiting for me. He has a rolled cigarette and a lighter in his hand. Like Hicks says “It looks like it was rolled by Jesus and fastened shut with Scarlet Johanssons pussy lips”
“How’d you get that in here?” I ask pointing to the rolled cigarette.
“You learn tricks after your first time here. Now I want you to flush the toilet while I exhale into it. Got it?”
I nodded. I know such tricks, I used to smoke in hotel bathrooms all the time, turn on the hot water and blaze. Now its my turn to smoke in the psych ward bathroom and never have I ever had a cigarette as good. My head spun in several directions and I could barely stand.
“So Dwayne, when was the last time you were here? What are you diagnosed with?”
“I’m schizophrenic” he looks down to the floor-tiles. So his suffering makes mine seem meager.
“Last time I was here was a couple of years back. How are you holding up? First time’s tough.” I appreciate his acknowledging that.
“I’m fine” I say imitating him, looking at the floor. It’s hard to talk about it.
“It’s just the noises at night. The walls are really thin here. I hear Mary crying, whimpering, I can hear her right now and every once in awhile Lionel screams and David scratchies his fucked up neck and whoever they have in isolation knocks on the metal door over and over again.” I wonder what they do to them in isolation, I keep picturing some poor soul with anodes and cathodes strapped to his head, begging them to stop.
“Man those are the good ones, the real sick patients never leave their rooms they just lay there in bed, day in and day out. Last time I was here they had to force feed my roommate and Mary, she doesn’t eat she only drinks Ensure they keep it in the fridge for her special.” Most of them have just given up, I wonder if they change their clothes or brush their teeth or shower or speak. The ward smells of rusty sweat and dried menstrual blood, I bet they don’t.
“Dwayne, you seem like a smart guy what are you doing in a place like this? Why don’t you have a job and a wife?” This is a stupid question, he doesn’t have a job and wife because he is schizophrenic. Disabled.
“I’m only twenty eight. I like reading books, my apartment in Trenton is packed with books. My main interest is in finding a reconciliation between capitalism and socialism. A middle ground so to speak built on solid economic theory. To find work in my field of interest I would need a Phd and I can’t afford that shit.” Or maybe the pressure has turned him into a diamond, unbreakable.
“Thanks for the cigarette, I really needed it.”
“No problem, brother.” I love it when black people call me brother, I’m always too scared to call them brother back.
On my way back to my room I see David standing in the hallway , writhing , his neck bent sideways as usual.
“Mo I need to talk to you come into my room, I need to talk to you.”
I’m a little frightened by this sudden show of friendship but he is probably harmless
“You’re a college student right?”
“Yeah”
“They like drugs on your campus.”
“Which drugs?.”
“Oxycontin.”
“You have Roxy’s?”
“I have a shitton of them, 80 mg’s I’m prescribed them but I never take them. Can you help me sell them?”
I know a lot of people who like Roxies. I don’t use them personally. They’re a rickety path down opium valley, take one wrong turn and you’re injecting heroin in an alleyway. But they are very profitable, up to eighty dollars a pill my druggie eyes glowed.
“Yes.”
***
I am half-asleep in Hashem’s moms 93’ Saab, black, leather interior. We are in a parking lot in Jaber complex next to the new liquor store. The moment seems to last forever, seats set back, sunroof open, not a care in the world.
"Its 7 am and we're still awake sitting in the car. Why? Because we're psychotic losers. Lets belch out "Yesterday", smoke a cigarette and start our day... Do you know what time it is? Its time to phonerape lilith and drive to Fuheys, fear and loathing style. She'll serve us breakfast, we've been living on whiskey and raw chicken."
The Godfather gave us his bottle of Chivas Regal for safekeeping. But we drank it all. Now we are in Jaber complex passed out in Hashem’s car. Hashem drives better drunk. We are going to go to Lilith’s house. Lilith is the girl from my hallucination, she was the girl in the white dress with the lights glinting off her toes. I call her lilith, after the demon. Fuheys is christian town, it’s far away by Jordanian standards about half an hour of driving and half an hour of getting lost in the desert looking for someone to ask for directions.
"Man Aamar needs to be here passed out in the backseat from too much Petra Beer. Its alright to be okay we don't need them anyway. Cigarettes and a gas of tank, we can make the sun in the wintertime. Lets go to the nozha bakery and have some free breakfast. Fucking criminals, the birds. Look how they hop, six sa7rawi birds doing shit with their lives. Look at the palm tree its just a stick waving at us. Where does green come from man. Lili needs to be Lebanesed. Its alright to be okay, I dont remember anyway, its okay life is flimsy, it doesn't even matter. Lets sleep in the car. Car sleeps too, drinks gas like we guzzle vodka.” Aamar left Amman he is in the british army now. Hashem likes to go to Nozha, one of the worst parts of Amman. His friend owns a bakery there. Where we sit in the heat of the ovens and drink and make bread. Hashem used to work there. I like that about him. I remember when he looked like a surfer with his wavy blonde hair but now it is all shaved off and he speaks the dialect of the roughnecks. We still speak English when we’re alone though.
“Open the sunroof we need some air." "What if a bird shits on us. Would you like to wake up with shit on your face?"
"Lets take the dog" "Its someone dog."
"Its not someones dog man, it's God's dog."
"Man im a kind person, I just open the way for these crazy fucks weasels weaving in and out of the street, beeping and shouting. It makes me want to drink like the old days, alone, until my eyes tear up. Life should be harder than this, its all put on a plate for us, we just have to take a step, people used to climb." Hashem is a kind person, one time we were drinking on the sidewalk of Good interiors. And he said to me “people look at me and they think I’m a wall” but he’s not. Lili used to want to suck Hashem’s cock but now she thinks he’s full of insecurities, holes in the wall. It takes one to know one.
Lili says to me:
“Shattered people are best expressed in bits and pieces.”
I want to say to her:
“You don’t even know what shattered means, you’re not shattered if you can find enough bits and pieces to express yourself. Shattered is when you wake up in a Brooklyn hospital and don’t know who the fuck you are. Thorazine-shuffling down dimly lit halls at five in the morning, crashing into chairs, no conception of time. When the nurse has to tell you what your name is. Shattered is when you look at your wall and see a heart and a ray of sunshine and realize you hate yourself. Before you can wish you were a zombie again the nurses come in and put you in isolation for drawing on your walls. You break your wrist knocking against the metal door because you’re still too shattered to learn from your mistakes.”
But I am not certain that I qualify as shattered, maybe I’m just broken. In a letter someone wrote to me but never sent she said I might be “some sort of broken genius”. Which is the worst form of praise.
I asked you to tell me something and you said:
“Shattered people are best expressed in bits and pieces”
How would you know? What if shattered people are best left unexpressed? They cut at the edges and give you infections. All you can talk about is the beauty of being free. You’re a slut who's scared of sex. A lone-hearted Mystic. With your spell-book of quotations . You tried to kill yourself three days ago and I said I was sorry it didn't work. I think everyone is shattered. I think life is a techni-colored collage of disconnected moments. I guess some people just have better glue and I was too busy sniffing it to pay attention to you. And I’m sorry that you have so many broken places, I’m sorry that your ideals left you behind I’m sorry that you’re so old but I’m younger than that now. And when you hear your mother’s voice in your head telling you to stay away from the windows or you’ll jump, remember me. Remember how lucky you are that they want you dead.
by Mo Jahmaa
