That night a young man named Jaafar Jalabi arrived at the ABC office. He was a friend of Nabih Berri and had been sent over to explain the real reason that the hostages hadn’t been released. I liked him immediately. For one thing he was scared, and there’s entirely too much bravery in Lebanon. Also he wore a Rolex. I have a personal theory that faithful, disciplined, highly principled, self-sacrificing people (in other words the people who are forever getting the rest of us killed) wear cheap wristwatches.
Hizbullah, said Jaafar, was refusing to release its Americans because President Reagan had said in a speech, “I don’t think anything that attempts to get people back who’ve been kidnapped by thugs, murderers, and barbarians is wrong to do.” Who knows how Hizbullah threaded its way through the syntax in that statement. Jaafar admitted any excuse probably would have done. A bureau chief led him off to make everything clear to Peter Jennings and the American public.
When Jaafar was through I asked him how he’d gotten dragged into this. He said Berri knew he’d gone to college in the United States and therefore it was felt he understood America. (So much for the theory of “highly sophisticated Shiite manipulation of American public opinion.” The last time a U.S. college student understood America, they shot him at Kent State.) “What’s going to happen,” I asked, “when the hostage crisis is over? Are the various Shiite factions going to . . . you know . . . ?”
“I’ve got a speedboat anchored down there,” said Jaafar, looking toward the Summerland’s little harbor, “and it’s packed with food and supplies.” That was something to remember. No matter how interested you are in social chaos, it’s always a good idea to keep an eye on the emergency exit.
Sunday morning I went down to the school in the Burj Barajna. The Amal said this time for sure they were getting all the loose Americans rounded up and out of there. The ride over was a lesson in what a rescue mission would have required. My Lebanese driver couldn’t find the place with a map. I suppose Delta Force could have stopped and asked directions like we did, but the Lebanese can be long-winded that way. My guess is our strike force would still be drinking tiny cups of coffee and trying to get out of buying a rug and a case of smuggled Marlboros.
The Burj was not really a slum, just an old neighborhood with haphazard alleys for streets and five-story stucco apartment buildings with gardens walled by breeze block. Dozens of these neighborhoods have been destroyed in the civil war, and creeping Miami Beachism was destroying them anyway before the war began. Small girls in what looked like first-communion dresses giggled in the doorways. Small boys followed the militiamen around and inspected the press corps’ equipment. Moms, dads, and quite a lot of attractive teenage daughters were standing on the balconies and looking out the windows with the usual tenement dwellers’ interest in local brouhaha. There were no chadors in evidence and not as many scarves as you’d see on the British royal family at the average horse show. This, then, is your howling mob of fanatical Shiites praying for martyrdom and dripping blood from the fangs.
The reporters were an uglier bunch by far. There were a hundred or more of them ganged up in the alley by the school. They looked as bad as the hostage tourists but fatter and meaner and dressed in even more ridiculous tropical travel clothes. With their panoply of tote bags, cameras, carryalls, haversacks, and phrase books, they seemed a kind of race of supertourists come to avenge the incarceration of their fellows. Indeed, it’s been suggested for years that the Beirut media should form their own militia. God knows, there are enough of them. And it would simplify many news stories: “Tonight on Nightline Ted Koppel threatens suicide attack unless he meets own demands to free self!”
The Amal were wearing any old thing. Some had on Miller Lite T-shirts and designer Levi’s, others were so laden with Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, sheath knives, pistols, spare clips, and ammo belts that they could hardly move. They looked like kids playing army. Which is what they are. The average age can’t be eighteen. They’re violently opposed to the imperialist, Zionist policies of the United States and will, however, if they speak any English, babble about which career they’ll pursue in America as soon as they get a Green Card. They have better manners than I ever did as an adolescent. I suspect it’s because they’re getting to live out all those Mad Max fantasies in their own backyards.
I committed a breach of Shiite etiquette by kissing Jane Evans, a CNN camerawoman I hadn’t seen in six months. One of the Amal kids admonished me with a smile. “You two, you are get married, huh?”
“Yes, yes, of course,” I said.
“And have many children?”
Naturally they like to try their weapons. When the press got obstreperous because Amal wouldn’t let anyone into the school, the kids cut loose with a dozen rounds of AK-47 fire. Your stomach muscles contract, you go into a crouch, chemical zaniness spurts through the bloodstream no matter how many times you’ve heard close fire and no matter that you know the guns are pointed in the air. It’s funny, too, seeing a hundred sweaty, red-faced newsmen in silly golf clothes duck-walking backward at sixty miles an hour.
I can’t tell you much about how it all ended. The next time you think to ask somebody about something “because he was there,” think again. I was there. Some towel-head from Hizbullah marched up and down the street twice. There was a certain amount of what passes for horseplay in these latitudes. “I blow you camera away,” said one of the older Amal guys to a network crew. He aimed his pistol. He pulled the trigger. Click. It wasn’t loaded. “Ha ha ha ha ha.” There was a lot of standing around in the sun with no beer.
About 5:00 in the evening the Amal let a few crews and reporters into the school. “We take one of each kind of type,” said a spokesman. “All English-speaking print media!” shouted my friend Robert Fisk from the London Times, the bastard. The lucky few got to stand around in the school for another couple hours while Hizbullah dignitaries gave free souvenir Korans to the hostages.
A convoy was standing ready behind Amal lines. I hustled for position so I could witness the send-off. But there are about seven ways out of the Burj and I picked the wrong one. The convoy went down another street and I was left watching a gaggle of French photographers bribe their way onto a balcony that overlooked nothing but more French photographers.
I felt rather forlorn. Here we were, the center of international attention, steeped in high drama, with danger on every side, and enormous expense accounts. Could we face the truth that lies in the dark corners of the heart . . . and admit we were having a really good time? No use, I supposed, asking the hostages to volunteer and stay for a while.
Moving to New Hampshire
Not long ago I moved from New York City to a small town in New Hampshire. I didn’t know much about country life, but I was in love with New England scenery. I wanted to do my writing in an atmosphere of pastoral serenity. And I felt a need for a healthier life. Also, I’d never had a roof repaired so I thought New York was the most expensive place on earth to live. Since many other city people are moving into the countryside, I feel an obligation to pass along what I’ve learned. I also feel an obligation to pay for my new roof.
When moving to rural New England, the first consideration is choice of a town. There are three kinds of towns in New England: towns that know they’re cute, towns that don’t know they’re cute, and towns determined to become cute no matter what.
Towns that know they’re cute are characterized by high realestate prices, frequent arts-and-crafts fairs, and numerous Volvos with “Save the Whales” bumper stickers. It’s Vermont, really, that specializes in this kind of town. You don’t want to live in one of these. The “shoppe” signs are all misspelled, the arts-and-crafts fairs tie up traffic, and (it hurts to tell this to the people in the Volvos) Vermont doesn’t have any whales.
Towns that don’t know they’re cute are even worse. Most seem to have zoning regulations requiring lawn ornaments and house trailers in every yard. You’ll buy a beautiful home on Main Street
and wake up the next morning to find someone else has bought the beautiful home directly across from you, torn it down, and built a gas station. And the teenage natives use the Meeting House’s 1690 weather vane for rifle practice. This is painful to those of us with finer aesthetic sensibilities who’d like to make it into a lamp.
The right kind of town is the one determined to become cute. My own town, Jaffrey, is one of these. We’re taking up a collection to repair the weather vane, and there’s an effort under way to have our Main Street gas station spell Shell with an extra “e.” Towns like Jaffrey have civic pride and local spirit, but they have their drawbacks too. Civic pride means committees. And there’s always the danger of getting drafted. Last year we had an infestation of gypsy moths. My committee spent three weeks cutting oak leaves out of yellow construction paper and gluing them to tree limbs so sightseers wouldn’t be disappointed during the autumn foliage season.
Once you’ve chosen a town, the next step is to choose a house. There is a general rule about houses in New England: the worse the architecture, the more authentically Colonial the house. If a house has a grand appearance, handsome layout, and large airy rooms, it’s Victorian junk. But if you can’t, at first glance, tell it from a mobile home, it was built before 1700. Of course, it isn’t fair to say that. Very few mobile homes have five-foot ceilings, basements full of water, or sill rot. Anyway, when checking for authenticity, make sure the rooms are the size of bath mats and that the electrical system looks horrid. Our colonial forebears seem to have been notably poor electricians.
One thing you will not have to worry about is your view. Every authentic Colonial house in New England has a splendid view. Just ask the real-estate agent. “View?” said mine. “Of course there’s a view! Climb out this window onto the porch roof, Mr. O’Rourke, and shinny up that chimney—absolutely breathtaking.”
Actually buying the house will be no different from buying a house anywhere else, except for the title search. New England deed records go back 350 years, and in every one of those years somebody made a mistake. This results in unusual deeds. One property I looked at had fifteen acres. Two acres were in front of the house and the remaining land ran in a three-inch-wide strip fifty-five miles north to Lake Winnipesaukee. Be prepared to pay a large legal fee. “You know,” said the local lawyer doing my title search, “that land originally belonged to the Indians. I had to go looking all over for them. I looked in Aspen, Vail, and Sun Valley. They weren’t there, so . . .”
And even after you’ve cleared the title and paid for the house, it won’t be called yours. My house is “the Yateman place.” There hasn’t been a Yateman in Jaffrey for fifty years. And I don’t think a Yateman ever owned my house anyway. “The Yateman place” is just a device to rag newcomers. Though I have been assured that my house will eventually be called “the O’Rourke place.”
“Everybody’ll call it that,” said a neighbor, “just as soon as you die there.”
Another thing, no matter how stately the home or how much land or how many outbuildings, the only thing the natives will ever say about it is, “You know that place sold for eight thousand in 1976.”
It will take time for you to get used to these country ways, not to mention getting used to the country itself. The climate, for instance—we have two seasons in New England, winter and getting-ready-for-winter. I was used to banging on my apartment building’s pipes when I wanted more heat in the middle of the night. I’ve found this doesn’t work with my own wood furnace. Nor are municipal services exactly like the city’s. I was putting trash out at the end of my driveway for three months before I noticed . . . well, I noticed three months’ worth of trash out at the end of my driveway.
Just running simple errands is a problem for transplanted New Yorkers. We are brusque, fast-moving people. But there’s an unwritten law in New England: Anytime you go anywhere to conduct any type of business, first you have to have a little talk.
When you go to the butcher shop, you’re not going there to buy meat. It’s a social call. Even if you’ve never seen the butcher before, you say, “How’s it going?” and “Come on by sometime” and “Give my regards to your wife if you’re married.”
He’ll say, “Black flies bad up at your place this year?”
You’ll say, “Getting any wood in?”
And so on. Anything to do with pot roast is strictly incidental, and the subject cannot be raised politely for at least thirty minutes.
This frightens me. I know people do it to be friendly. I try to talk for hours with everyone I see. But I’m scared that if I call the fire department and yell “Help! My house is on fire!” I’ll get someone on the other end of the line saying, “Ah-yep, fellow down at Antrim had his house on fire too. Must have been just about this time, 1981. Black flies bad up at your place this year?”
The local newspapers are a great help in catching the spirit of country life. These publications show that rural New Englanders live in a different world than New Yorkers, possible on a different planet.
I’ve been collecting items from the papers in my area. This headline was printed large on page one of the Monadnock Ledger: “Spaghetti Supper Set for Friday.” It’s the sort of headline we could do with more of in the New York Post. “Motorist Damages Yard in Hit and Run Accident”—that appeared on the front page of the Peterborough Transcript. And here, from the Keene Sentinel, is my personal favorite: “Maine Legislature Goes Home.”
A story about the planning board in Jaffrey read, in part, “The planners did not decide on the subdivision last week. By the time the public hearings were over ... it was after 11:00 P.M. The planners did not think they should be making decisions when they were tired.” It’s hard to imagine Congress being that downright. I’d like to see a story in the New York Times saying, “Congressmen did not decide on the defense budget last night. The members of Congress did not think they should be making decisions when they were half-witted, corrupt, and drunk.” But the most telling item I’ve found in my local papers read simply, “Money was found on Middle Hancock Road on Sunday, June 5.” Eleven words which paint a picture of almost baffling decency.
Things like that will make you want to get to know your neighbors. Believe me, they’ll already know you. New Englanders are not nosy. They pride themselves on respecting the privacy of others. All the same, they manage to know everything about you, and sometimes they’ll let it slip. You’ll be on the phone, making a long-distance call. “Operator,” you’ll say, “I’m having trouble getting through to my mother in Florida.”
The operator will say, “You really ought to call her more often, and you haven’t written her a real letter since Christmas.”
Or you’ll be shopping in a local store and the salesclerk, a total stranger to you, will say, “But that’s not the kind of undershirt you usually wear.”
The first of these neighbors you should get to know is the plumber. Marry him if you can. In some rural places the most prominent citizen is the doctor or the reverend at the church; not so in New England. It’s the plumber, and for good reason. When your water pipes freeze and burst at 3:00 A.M., try calling an M.D. or a priest.
It will be easier to get to know the plumber, and everyone else, if you understand local values. One local value is early rising. Don’t let on that you sleep until 10:00. It’s considered hilarious. Personally, I sleep in my clothes with a coffee mug beside my bed. That way, when someone rings the doorbell at 5:00 A.M. to see if I’d like help stacking cordwood, I can run downstairs with cup in hand and pretend to have been awake for hours. Getting up early means going to bed early, and it worries people if you don’t. When I first moved to Jaffrey, I was having a 1:00 A.M. nightcap when I heard a knock on the door. It was a concerned-looking native in a bathrobe. “We saw your lights on,” he said. “Is anything wrong?”
The two most important New England values, however, are honesty and thrift. Honesty you’ve already seen exampled in Middle Hancock Road where someone found money a
nd did what only a born and bred small-town Yankee would do and called the newspapers. This honesty is a great thing but dangerously habit-forming. On visits to New York I have found myself telling people, “Just charge me what you think is fair.” And there is no polite way to express what people in New York think is fair.
More important even than honesty is thrift, not to say outright tight-fistedness. Money in the city is like money in Weimar Germany. You go to the Citibank cash machine, get a wheelbarrowful of the stuff, and shovel it out whenever you’re told. Then you cross your fingers and hope to die before the Visa Card people process your change of address. But Yankees are serious about spending money. And they give advice at length on the subject.
“Drive over to Portland, Maine,” they’ll say, “and you can get two cents off paper towels.” Or “There’s a special on five-gallon cans of margarine at the A&P. Limit, six to a customer.” And they’re especially forthcoming with advice about what you should have paid for your house. “You know that place sold for eight thousand in 1976.”
Besides changes in values, country life means changes in all your activities. Many city pursuits are inappropriate to the new venue. If you go jogging in Jaffrey, people will stop and offer you a ride. And having dinner at 9:00 is considered as bizarre as sunbathing on a roof. Do not, however, adopt local customs wholesale.
Fishing, for example, turns out to be less serene than it looks on calendars. It is a sport invented by insects and you are the bait.
Hunting is as uncomfortable and much more hazardous. Deer hunting, particularly, attracts Visigothic types from places like Worcester, Massachusetts. I spend all of deer-hunting season indoors trying not to do anything deerlike.
Republican Party Reptile Page 19