Koolaids

by Rabih Alameddine

  NAWAL:God, that must be tough.

  KURT:It is. It really is tough.

  MARWA:It might get better.

  KURT:(smiles gently at Marwa) No, dear, it only gets worse.

  MARWA:I’m sorry.

  …

  Beirut was the center of the Arab world. It also was the most Western and modern city in the region, even more so than Tel Aviv. American, French, and national schools taught three languages, Arabic, French, and English. Both Middle Eastern and European history were emphasized. Arabs, Europeans, Americans, Asians, and Africans, lived and worked in the city. The regional branches of all international banks, multinational corporations, and the regional headquarters of all the international press were located in Beirut. Lebanese banks considered only the Swiss as their competition.

  Theaters alternated Arabic plays with Western ones. They showed American, English, French, and Arabic films, as well as kung fu movies, of course. Television shows were never dubbed. French shows were subtitled in both English and Arabic, and English shows were in French and Arabic. Even taxi drivers spoke a little English and French, with the native Arabic.

  There was a free press, and political ideas and criticisms were bandied about endlessly without inhibition. The schools and the universities were the best in region, and so were the hospitals. Doctors and university professors were educated at home or abroad, and they were both nationals and foreigners.

  The tourist trade flourished. The hotels were top-notch. Exquisite restaurants were open twenty-four hours. The Casino du Liban was world-class. The mountains provided ski resorts in the winter and cool summer resorts during the hot months in Beirut for those who had their fill of swimming in the Mediterranean.

  Mosques and churches stood literally side by side. Seventeen different religious groups, Muslim and Christian sects, a Druze and a sizable Jewish community, flourished in Beirut.

  Then a war began.

  …

  Winter of 1980. I was still living in Paris. Nineteen years old and naïve as can be. I was walking in one of the many passages off rue Montmartre when I spotted a sign that said Hammam pour Hammes. A men’s Turkish bath sounded exciting. I went in to investigate. It cost a lot to enter, which surprised me. The attendant gave me a locker key, attached to a cloth bracelet to tie around my wrist.

  I entered through the double swinging doors, like saloon doors in an old Western movie. John Wayne swung the doors and burst through. In reality, it was more like Beaver Cleaver putting his head through the doors to make sure it was safe. The locker rooms had a number of men in various stages of undress. Exciting. I felt uncomfortable as they stared at me. I couldn’t even look back, no furtive glances even, my usual fare when in locker rooms. These men were not behaving normally. They were openly staring.

  I was undressing when a Lebanese man walked in. I could tell he was Lebanese right away. He opened the locker right next to mine. He was a typical Lebanese if there was such a thing. Perfumed, well dressed, and tons of jewelry. It took about ten minutes for him to remove the rings, the chains, the bracelets, all manly jewelry. He was wearing a wedding ring.

  In my locker was a towel. When I took it out, my mouth dropped. It was long enough. I could wrap it around my waist twice, but it was so short it barely covered my butt. It was then I realized this was a gay place. I was so naïve. I looked up and for the first time I saw fat men, with towels barely covering anything, walking by, staring at me. I thought about getting dressed and leaving. I gathered my courage and stayed. I should at least look around.

  The hammam had apparently a number of floors, all underneath the ground floor where I had entered. It was as if it was going into the bowels of the earth. I looked around the ground floor—two locker rooms, a bar, a sauna, and a shower room. There were two small rooms with small cots where the lighting was so bad one could hardly see. I did not figure out what they were for till later.

  The floor below had toilets and a steam room with accompanying showers. I kept going down, and the next floor had another sauna, a swimming pool, and a Jacuzzi. It was on this floor I woke up and realized what this place was all about. Through a badly lit entryway, I got into another dark area. A sign said video room, so I went in to see what was in there. It was a gay porno video, and men were sitting close, masturbating each other. I closed the door in a hurry. As I walked through the entryway, I saw the same dark rooms as on the floors above, but these were not empty. Some doors were closed and others had naked men, in various positions, who looked at me, pleading with me to join them. I pretended not to notice, but I was suffocating. What if someone saw me there? The last room was the pièce de résistance. It was larger than the others, darker even. I first saw shadows moving slightly, but as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw a group of no less than ten men in some form of sexual position which I am still trying to untangle to this day. What caught my eye was one boy, probably my age or younger, riding at least one penis, his face in pure ecstasy, his mouth open, forming a vowel of some sort, looking as if he was about to commence singing the “Marseillaise.” He happened to glance my way, and our eyes locked. His eyes asked me to join him. I broke away, running.

  I hurried back up. I was nervous as hell and wanted to get out of there. As I hurried up the stairs, I saw the Lebanese man. He was sitting between two other Lebanese men on a sofa. They were ogling me as I was coming up. He said to the other two in Arabic, “Look at this one. He is so beautiful.” I felt myself flush all over. I had to pretend not to understand what he said. I got an erection and my hands went down to cover it, since the towel was not much help. “I sure could fall in love with this one,” the other Lebanese said. I quickly went by them, continuing up to the ground floor. “What an ass! What a beautiful ass! I could fuck that ass all night.” By the time I reached my locker, I thought everybody could see how red my face was. Everybody must have seen how hard my erection was. I must have set a record with how fast I dressed and ran out of there. That was the only time I had ever been to a bathhouse.

  I have tried to explain to Mark why I consider that experience going up the stairs the most erotic of my life. I have never been able to. I have never been able to understand it myself. I realize my sexual experiences are very limited, yet try as I might, I can’t seem to figure why some lecherous countrymen in a bathhouse, admiring me and my physique, would turn me on so much. All I have to do is think of that experience and I get tingly and flush all over. I have never had sex with a Lebanese. I have never had sex in Lebanon. The only Lebanese I was ever attracted to was Karim and I am not sure that was really sexual.

  I am at a loss to explain it.

  …

  Everybody knows how inefficient government agencies like the U.S. Postal Service or the DMV are, but when it comes to the Centers for Disease Control, they somehow think it is not a bureaucracy. The CDC is simply the post office with white lab coats.

  …

  They forget about us. Israel attacks Lebanon, it is front page news. They kill children in an ambulance, it still is news. They bomb a UN shelter killing 105 civilians, it gets reported. The fighting goes on for a week, it gets moved back to page three. It goes on for two weeks, more people die, and it is no longer news.

  It’s a short attention span.

  When did the last AIDS story make a newspaper’s front page? My friends die. They keep dying, but people forget. Life goes on.

  People forget. They forget who Assad is. Americans forget Assad killed twenty thousand of his own people by having his air force bomb Hamma, their own city. They forget all the terrorist groups he helped foster. In the new world order, he is a major player.

  The Christians forget they begged the Syrians to get involved in Lebanon. They were losing the war. When the Syrians invaded, the Druze fought them in the mountains. A while later, it was the Christians who fought them valiantly. The Druze became allies of the Syrians, even though t
hey killed their spiritual and political leader. They too forget.

  We all forget. We become pawns in a game we don’t understand. Drug companies sell us drugs which won’t heal us, but we need them. Money comes and goes, but we don’t see anything resembling a cure. We forget Israel used nail bombs in Lebanon, bombs which sent nails flying all over the place. We forget Syria massacred one thousand Lebanese soldiers in Ba’abda. The war stops, and starts again, and we forget about it.

  The Israelis forget. They forget Pierre Gemayel started the Phalange party, naming it after Franco’s fascist party. They forget that Pierre’s idols were Hitler and Mussolini. Pierre and the Israelis became best friends.

  Assad cannot afford a peace settlement. He prods Peres into a war he can’t win. They both sit on the sidelines, shrugging shoulders. People die, and it is no longer newsworthy.

  Assad kidnaps and tortures thousands of Lebanese. Warren Christopher wants to negotiate with him. Peres kidnaps and tortures thousands of Lebanese. Christopher kisses his ass.

  The Lebanese forget. Syrian rule is better than Christian rule, and Israeli rule is better than Muslim rule. Drug companies ring their cash registers. Reagan sleeps well at night. He has forgotten everything.

  Welcome to my world, motherfuckers.

  …

  I am standing in a hospital room. There are three beds, each with emaciated men dying. The men are uncovered, wearing flimsy hospital gowns. Each has his own IV stand next to his bed. The room has two large windows through which a bed, with a fourth dying man, can be seen on the ledge outside.

  A woman stands in the middle of the room. She has black hair and black eyes, but is very light-skinned, pale. She is very thin and looks good in a long black dress.

  “I believe you forgot some money a while back,” she says. I realize she is right. I could not remember the amount, but I had not taken all of my money out of a bank when it left town. I did not bother since it was a piddling amount. “It has grown because of interest through the years, of course,” she says. “Let’s look at how much you have now.”

  She moves to the window and opens it. She pulls in a large black suitcase. She opens it. “Oh my,” she exclaims. “You now have $582,262.23.” The suitcase is full of money. I am so happy. She is so happy for me. She hugs me. All enveloping. I feel so good.

  …

  In reality, Lebanon has no mail service. It never did. A postal service does exist, but I doubt anybody knows why. Like most government bureaucracies, it is completely incompetent. The only thing the Lebanese postal service has in common with its American counterpart is a penchant for sophisticated assault rifles in killing people. Of course, in Lebanon, this is by no means exclusive to postal workers.

  Although some streets have names, most houses or buildings do not have numbers. An address with a number and street would be a complete mystery. When filling out various government forms, addresses would appear something like this:

  MR. ALAA ABU NABI AND FAMILY,

  6TH FLOOR, AMIN BASTAWI BUILDING,

  NEXT TO THE BIG FISH MARKET,

  (PHONE NUMBER 860 634)

  AISHE BAKKAR, BEIRUT

  Still, even with such a clear address, the mail is rarely delivered. To get any kind of mail, one needs a post office box, and a hefty bribe to the head honcho at the post office in which one’s box is located.

  …

  My sister turned out to be unlike any of us, intelligent. In our family, that was a noncompute. She sat for her Baccalaureate exams when she was fifteen. At sixteen, she was studying philosophy at the American University of Beirut. My father had numerous fits of androcentric apoplexy. He felt it was an egregious affront against the family. He eschewed his usual laconic speech patterns for unending diatribes, which he really should have simply recapitulated into “What man would want to marry a woman smarter than him?”

  My eldest brother, Farid, believed she needed an education, which my father probably thought was heretic. When the fighting grew heavy again, he paid for her trip to New York and arranged for a minimal monthly stipend. It was minimal because she had a full scholarship at Columbia.

  I do not know if Farid would have helped her had he known she was to meet me and move in. I would hope he would have. He is twelve years older than I.

  Nawal finally got her Ph.D. from Stanford. She intends to go back to Beirut, after I die, of course. I do not see why. She kept going home at least twice a year throughout her college years. She was the family bridge.

  …

  May 17th, 1995

  Dear Diary,

  I don’t know what is happening to my country. It is as if it is being torn in two. Everybody seems to be fornicating all over the place. The Department of Health floods the market with AIDS awareness ads, but none of the men seem to pay any attention. Condoms are considered unmanly. Prostitutes are readily available. Russian, Romanian, and Czech girls are selling their wares in Jounieh. Local Shiite girls are selling theirs in Al Dahieh. What a strange world this has become. Poor Shiite girls can make money in two ways, either by becoming prostitutes or by diapering themselves. It seems Iran pays two hundred dollars a month to any girl who puts on a diaper. I know I am insulting Muslim women everywhere when I call the traditional head cover a diaper, but it is so appropriate. Everybody here calls it that anyway. A diapered woman is one who covers her whole body except for her hands and face. Thankfully, no one here wears the Iranian black chadors where only the eyes can be seen. Maybe Iran would pay a thousand dollars a month if women wore that.

  Prostitution or diapers? What a choice. What a crazy world we live in.

  …

  I was terrified. I had been depressed for months. My friends were dying. My blood results had been declining.

  Something had to be done.

  I flew to the high desert of Arizona, my haven. I said, “Father, can you help me?”

  Father asked me if I was sure I wanted help. I tried to convince him. Father suggested that I spend three days in silence and fasting. No talking. No music. No food. No reading. Me, myself.

  Father suggested I spend the time meditating. I was to calm my mind, repeating a mantra, Sensa Uma. Three days.

  I was not much into meditating. My mind filled me with constant activity.

  Sensa Uma. Sensa Uma. Sensa Uma.

  I never really liked Sanskrit. My Western mind rejected it.

  I was hungry.

  Sensa Uma. Sensa Uma. Sensa Uma.

  I was delirious. It was silly.

  Sensa Uma. Sensa Uma. Sensa Uma.

  I laughed hysterically. I spent a whole day laughing. Sanskrit, my ass. I regained my sense of humor. Sense of humor. Sense of humor.

  My health improved.

  …

  I wanted to write a poem on my deathbed.

  ON THE DEATHBED

  Go, rest your head on a pillow, leave me alone;

  leave me ruined, exhausted from the journey of this night,

  writhing in a wave of passion till the dawn.

  Either stay and be forgiving,

  or, if you like, be cruel and leave.

  Flee from me, away from trouble;

  take the path of safety, far from this danger.

  We have crept into this corner of grief,

  turning the water wheel with a flow of tears.

  While a tyrant with a heart of flint slays,

  and no one says, “Prepare to pay the blood money.”

  Faith in the king comes easily in lovely times,

  but be faithful now and endure, pale lover.

  No cure exists for this pain but to die,

  So why should I say, “Cure this pain”?

  In a dream last night I saw

  an ancient one in the garden of love,

  beckoning with his hand, saying, “Come here.”
<
br />   On this path, Love is the emerald,

  the beautiful green that wards off dragonsnough, I am losing myself.

  If you are a man of learning,

  read something classic,

  a history of the human struggle,

  and don’t settle for mediocre verse.

  I was unable to. Jalaleddine Rumi wrote much better than I ever could, in the thirteenth century no less.

  …

  Laura answered the door. She tried to smile welcome. Not an easy task. Eyes puffed, skin pallid, shirt stained. Taking care of her brother was draining the life out of her. Succubus in action.

  We hugged. She told me Kurt was doing even worse. The doctor was just there and he said Kurt would not make it through the night. All medications were stopped. No IV. He was not in much pain because the morphine patches had begun to kick in.

  I held her in my arms as we walked the long Victorian corridor to Kurt’s room. Three friends of his were in the room, Sara, Jack, and James. Kurt had many friends.

  Kurt was snoring. I sat next to his bed. I did not want to disturb him. He looked dead already. He opened his eyes suddenly.