Koolaids (16 page)

I agreed with him. For the entire time I was painting, I was doing it because I loved the fact I could call myself an artist. People were always impressed by that. I was also doing it because I loved painting, but deep down I realized I knew nothing about art. I always felt like a fake when someone complimented my work. I became somewhat arrogant to compensate for my insecurities. In one blow, he forced my hand.

He did not mention my paintings for a while. About a week later, I went to visit Scott. Mo was in his studio painting. I walked in and he did not stop painting. I sat and watched. I was entranced. The painting was a representational 60 by 80, three men and a woman, sitting at a kitchen table. There was a woman standing on the side, frontal view, lifting her skirt up and peeing. She had male genitals. On the kitchen table were a book, a hypodermic needle, and a .357 magnum.

I saw the brush move all around the canvas, as if it had a mind of its own. He rarely looked at his palette. He mixed colors on the canvas itself. He carried a dirty rag in his left hand and would wipe out entire parts of the canvas in one swoop. There would be four people at the kitchen table, then there would be three. The skirt would come down, then it would go up. Nighttime, daytime. Day turned into night and I was still sitting there watching. He had been painting for over nine hours straight, and I had sat there and watched. I had a couple of bathroom breaks, but he had none.

He did not stop on his own. Scott came in and said dinner was ready. Mo said he did not want any dinner. Scott took the brushes Mo was using and threw them in the garbage can. Mo cursed as he dug through the garbage for his brushes. He put them aside and went to wash up for dinner.

The next day, I started a new painting. I tried a portrait of Juan, who had just died. I could not draw very well, so it never really looked like him. I finished it in about a week. I liked the result. It was not like anything I had done before. I gathered all my courage and took it to Mo's studio. He said it was awful. He took me to the San Francisco Museum of Modem Art and sat me down in front of a David Park. I was not to move from my seat for at least an hour. He left me there.

I started another painting, a portrait of Steve, who had also just died. I finished it in about three days. I thought it was a much better painting than Juan's. I took it over to Mo. He said it was terrible. He sat me down with a book of Rembrandts. I could not understand why he would want me to look at that book since I could not paint like that in a million years. He closed the book and took it away. I had to beg him to give it back.

He thought my third painting was a piece of shit. He said I was regressing. He explained to me some things about composition. My fourth painting was disgusting. My colors were all wrong. Back to the Museum of Modern Art for an hour in front of Matisse. My fifth painting was nothing short of repulsive. It must have been done by a blind man. Vermeer to study aesthetics.

I gave up. There was no way I could paint. Seeing all those great paintings had discouraged me. I could never do what those painters did. That was when my mother passed away. A month passed and I did not show Mo any paintings since I had not done any. He probably assumed it was because my mother had died. I could not tell him I was not going to paint anymore. He never mentioned my painting during that time.

My paints were still out. A blank canvas stared at me every night. I decided to do a last painting of my mother. I finished it in one night. I thought it was a weak painting, but I loved it. The composition was not very good. The drawing was actually bad. The color was muddy because I had used so much paint, except for a small red stroke which I thought was a stroke of genius. I sarcastically convinced myself that one stroke of genius could make a painting work.

I took my painting to Mo. He looked at it for a while. All he said was, “That's not bad.” I broke into tears. I sobbed like a baby. He got upset, stood up, and screamed, “I didn't say it was any good. I just said it's not bad. What's the matter with you?” He left the studio in a huff. I kept crying.

Scott put his head through the door, smiling from ear to ear. “He liked it, huh?”

“He said it wasn't bad,” I choked between sobs.

“Ooooh, he liked it. He liked it.”

…

“Are we merely blind brutes loosed in a system of mindless energy, impotent, misdirected, and insolent?”

“No,” Coover says aloud, “we are not.”

“We are,” I say.

“We're not,” he insists.

“We are.”

“We're not.”

“We are.”

“Not.”

“Are too.”

“Not.”

“Are too.”

I stick my tongue out at him. He is so petulant.

…

“Did you check out his socks?” Georges asked his friends.

“No,” replied the dark-haired fighter. “Were they good?”

“They were great, Ted Lapidus.”

“If you want them, you would have to go down and get them,” the other boy said.

“I think I will.” Georges athletically jumped over the bridge, landing on the soft ground two meters below. He walked under the bridge where they had stacked up the bodies. Finding what he was looking for, he took off the corpse's shoes, making sure the socks didn't get any mud on them. The socks in his pocket, he climbed back up to his position on the bridge.

“Did you find them?”

“I sure did,” Georges said, taking the offered cigarette from his friend.

Another car was approaching the barricade. He stood up, released the safety from his machine gun. The car stopped, window opened, driver smiled nervously.

“Identity card,” Georges ordered.

…

When he opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour, which was really a good thing because any kind of noise would make the soufflé drop, and there is nothing worse than a flaccid soufflé, is there, Jezebel darling? Fallen! Fallen is the great soufflé! Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great! From the sky huge hailstones of about a hundred pounds each fell upon men. And they cursed God on account of the plague of hail and the fallen soufflé.

I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. He was at Bloomingdale's trying to return the seven lampshades, but the salesclerk would hear none of it. “I am the alpha and the omega,” he kept repeating. “Well, Mr. Alpha,” she said in her Puerto Rican accent, “the sign says no returns without a receipt. Can't you read?”

Balak sighed. In Laodicea, there were no soufflés to be found. “Woe! Woe, O great city, dressed in fine linen, purple and scarlet, and glittering with gold, precious stones, and pearls! In one hour such great wealth has been brought to ruin. So where is my fucking soufflé?”

…

July 5th, 1996

Dear Diary,

Today would have been Samir's thirty-sixth birthday. I was unable to stop crying all day. What a fucked-up world we live in. What a cruel, cruel world. What a cruel God or what an incurably frivolous God.

…

Everybody came to stay with us in the summer of 1982, everybody. Grandma Nabila and Grandpa Boutros, Uncle Yousef, his wife and three kids, Aunt Fawzieh, her husband and four children, Uncle Mustapha, his wife and three children, and Aunt Lina. That made twenty-one of us in the house. They stayed with us until the PLO left in late August.

It was very strange. I was an only boy. The house was just for my mother and me since my father died. Having all these kids staying in our house was strange, not bad, just strange. I had to share the sofa with my cousin Zuhair. I would sleep on one end and he on the other, and our legs met in the middle to do battle. He was thirteen, a year older than I was. He was the first one to play with my penis.

Uncle Mustapha was furious all the time. The Israelis were everywhere. Their big guns were all around us bombing West Beirut. He would look out the window to see the tanks, no more than a hundred meters away, shelling his home. The Israelis laid siege to West Beirut for a long time. We all watched. Grandpa Boutros was never as upset as his son. He just kept saying everybody was crazy, which was true, of course.

I got used to having everybody around. My cousins and I created all these different games to play during the day, and at night Zuhair and I came up with even more games. So on the day the PLO agreed to the Israeli demands, I was a little disappointed that everybody would leave. The Israelis did not stop bombing after the agreement, however. They kept firing a long time after that. Everybody waited till the day the PLO left Beirut before they went home because Uncle Mustapha kept saying the Israelis would keep shelling no matter what they agreed to. When they left, it turned out only Aunt Fawzieh's home was completely destroyed.

Zuhair and I never played penis games again. He found better things to do with it, I presume. I did not.

…

NAWAL:
(putting the coffee cup down)
So how's your love life these days?

KURT:
Don't ask!

MARWA:
She just did.

NAWAL:
This is good coffee.

KURT:
I don't mind talking about it. There is not much to talk about. I don't have one and it's not because of lack of trying. It's just difficult to find someone to have any kind of relationship with.

NAWAL:
There are a lot of men in the city who are in a similar health situation. Isn't there some social group or gathering where you can meet other guys?

KURT:
There are lots of them. It's just not conducive to salacious trysts.

NAWAL:
What do you mean?

KURT:
When two men in my health situation get together, it isn't very erotic. It just isn't, no matter how much we may want it to be.

MARWA:
Why is that?

KURT:
Oh, I don't know. It just isn't. Just yesterday I met this guy. We were supposed to get together for the sole purpose of having sex, and it didn't happen.

MARWA:
What happened?

KURT:
We had talked on the phone. He had left a message on a phone sex line saying he was looking for a nice guy to have sex with. He said he was HIV-positive. Well, I left him a message and he called me back. We got along great. We could not get together right away. He kept leaving me these messages and I began hesitating, thinking he was a little too desperate. That's funny, right? Me thinking someone else is desperate. Anyway, he finally called me the day before yesterday. He left a long message on my machine telling me what he was going to do to my hard dick when we got together. Well, we got together yesterday. We decided to meet right here in this coffee shop. When he first showed up, I realized he was not my type, but I thought he was a nice guy anyway and I would go to bed with him.
(Pause. Drinks coffee.)
Anyway, he sat down and I asked how he was feeling. He said he was feeling kind of queasy. I asked him what he was taking. He started reciting the litany of drugs. He was on 3TC, D4T, and Saquinavir. He was also taking Acyclovir as a prophylactic against herpes. Septra for pneumocystis, Sporanox for fungus. The list was endless. About as long as mine actually. We started comparing drugs. Is Saquinavir better than Crixivan? Isn't it hell to have to eat three meals a day, making sure you drink a glass of grapefruit juice with each meal to be able to take Saquinavir. Let me tell you, if we had a single lascivious thought in our mind, it was gone after the first ten seconds. Hell, I started feeling queasy. Twenty minutes later, he just stood up and said, “It was nice meeting you. See you later.” That was it.

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.