Koolaids (20 page)

“I love watching your face when I play with your pussy.”

“Do you have to be this vulgar?”

“Yes.” He smiled.

“You haven't answered the question.”

“Yes, I have killed.”

“Was it from afar or have you actually killed someone directly?”

“Both.”

“A lot of people?”

“A lot of people.”

“Are you sure you want to talk about this?” he asks.

“Yes. But please stop. I can't think when you're doing that.”

“You're thinking fine.” He smiles.

“Why?”

“It is wartime.”

“That's not a reason. There are lots of men who are not killing.”

“Not many. I am more honest.”

“I don't understand.”

“You will in time.”

“Aren't you afraid of being killed?” she asks.

“All the time.”

“Do you have a gun?” he asks.

“No, of course not.”

He rolls on top of her, takes his hand out, and opens the drawer of the nightstand. He takes out five pistols, one by one, places them on her stomach, and rolls back over. His hand goes back to its favorite position.

“I don't want a gun.”

“You have to.”

“Are they loaded?”

“Yes.”

“You're crazy.”

She pushes the guns away from her. He sits up, kneels, her legs around his waist. He picks up a gun and shows it to her.

“I think this would suit you.”

“Okay.”

He uses the barrel of the gun to massage her vaginal lips.

“It's loaded,” she says.

“I know.” He smiles.

The barrel penetrates. He moves it in very gently. The metal is cold. He explores with the gun. She can't say a word. She moans. He smiles. He looks into her eyes. She is his.

“Fuck me,” she says.

He takes the gun out. He violently enters her. She thrusts up to meet him. The primitive cadence begins again.

She takes the gun from his hand. She points it at his face, her finger clutching the trigger. He smiles. He forces himself deeper. She moves the gun closer to his face. He licks the barrel. He tastes her. He puts the whole barrel in his mouth. He performs fellatio on the gun. She smiles. She looks into his eyes. He is hers.

She orgasms.

…

Kaposi's sarcoma.

The cancer was discovered originally among Mediterranean and Jewish men in 1871. Before AIDS, it was documented only in about six hundred cases in the last century. It usually struck Jewish and Italian men in their sixties. Purple lesions. With the onset of AIDS, the cancer was still discriminatory. It attacked only gay men, not hemophiliacs or heterosexuals, the most vain group of them all.

I am Mediterranean. I never got Kaposi's sarcoma. All my friends did.

I did contract toxoplasmosis and I fucking hate cats.

…

Scott arrived in San Francisco in early June, 1980. On June 29th, he attended his first Gay Freedom Day Parade. He loved it.

While standing and cheering the various contingents, he was approached by a thirty-two-year-old doctor. He fell in love. The doctor asked him if he wanted to party. Scott agreed.

The doctor gave him a pill.

The doctor took him dancing at the Galleria design center. Scott felt no pain. Five thousand people made it a tight dance floor. The doctor took off his shirt and threw it into the crowd. Scott danced. The doctor danced crotch to crotch. He undid Scott's belt. Scott felt the finger penetrate. He felt another hand playing with his ass. He felt a third.

They were at the Bulldog Baths. The doctor showed the
ingénu
the Bacchanalian delights.

Scott wanted to be kissed. The doctor tied him up, head down, with his ass up in the air. The doctor fucked him. And fucked him. But that was not the doctor. A third man had taken his place. A black man. A Latino. There was a line. The pleasure was constant. The most intense experience. In. Out. In. Out. Change.

At some point, during the night, the virus made his acquaintance.

The doctor did not call the next day.

I met Scott ten days later.

…

Lebanon is a piece of land (not a piece of heaven at all—you only have to be in Beirut in the summer) but it's
our
land,
our home
(even if actually we are not living there). It's our Sweet Home, and we
love
it. So we are called Lebanese.

…

August 12th, 1982

Dear Diary,

This is without doubt the worst day of my life. I can't take it anymore. The Israelis have gone stark raving mad. The planes started bombing at 6:00
a.m
. and did not stop till 6:00
p.m
. My nerves are shot. I don't understand what they want. They got everything. The Palestinians said they would leave. The Syrians are gone. But they still bomb us. What is it they want? Do they want us all dead? The PLO agreed to their terms. What more do they want? Haven't we suffered enough?

…

If her mother sees her now, she will have a heart attack and die. The driver keeps looking back at her in the mirror, smiling. She considers moving sideways so she does not have to see his eyes. Nick is between her legs, doing what he does best. She looks at the cars, as the white Range Rover speeds by. It is crowded on the highway.

…

It is pointless to describe in detail the exhibit at the Audrey Heller Gallery, Mohammad: The Last Paintings. Mere words cannot do it justice. It is exiguous, yet exquisite. It is minimal, yet unequivocally not Minimal, for it needs no manifesto or interminable elaboration. His style has become as laconic in statement as a parallel, as suggestively infinite. Mohammad is an imagist of cultural fugues and choreographies, of the faltering, lamentable Dance of Life. One pirouette is not the same as another, but there is no need to dance until one drops in a marathon. In painting, it is only necessary to outline the steps. Let the people dance!

…

I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is reality.

…

Mohammad: The Last Paintings, a posthumous exhibit, is a tribute to the painter's genius. It details a bittersweet account of a tumultuous life. It will assure him immortality.

…

I am in Berlin with my parents. We are on the street. We find out a parade is about to pass. I realize my parents might be embarrassed because it is a gay parade. It will raise issues they would rather not discuss. I am shocked, for I realize I am wearing women's clothing. I have a short wig on. No makeup, nothing flamboyant, just simple feminine stuff. It is pointless to change now for my father has already seen me as a woman. I take my wig off, for it becomes unnecessary.

…

My father is a good man, stuck in a cultural time warp. I find it hard to forgive him at times, until I am reminded how much I have grown up to resemble him. He wished his life to be simple, and due to circumstances beyond his control, it didn't turn out that way. He was a tyrant, softened up quite a bit with age, I hear, but he was always predictable. He laid down the law for everybody, and never deviated from it. I knew what the rules were. I knew that to be who I was meant a complete disinheritance, a complete disowning. I chose to be who I am today. It was never his fault.

…

I yearn for a moment I know nothing of.

I pine for a feeling, an impression of myself as content, fulfilled. At times, I feel it as a yearning for a lover, someone to share my life with, someone to laugh with. I loved, lost, and loved again. The longing never abated. I was only distracted for a little while. I searched for the elusive grail.

In that moment, I envision myself joyous, spiritually felicitous. When I shut my eyes, I feel the possibility of the moment. I long to understand.

Someday, I used to tell myself. Someday, I will know the moment I yearn for, someday.

I wait for the peace beyond all understanding.

I lie on my deathbed waiting.

I yearn for a moment I know nothing of.

…

“A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations.”

Paul Valéry was looking intently at me. Tired, I leaned back on the sofa. I needed rest.

“Do you think this is done?” I asked wearily.

“Sure,” Paul replied. “You're dead. Your work is complete.”

“Oh, good.”

…

The Israeli planes flew so low the sonic boom shattered the windows. Marwa screamed.

“I don't want to stay here, Mom. Most of my friends have left.”

“Okay,” Najwa said. “I've decided. We're leaving. Go on and start packing.”

“Good.”

Najwa knew this was serious. The Israelis have been bombing Beirut, going unchallenged, for years. This time, everybody thought it would be more serious. The Israeli ambassador in London was shot the day before. No one claimed responsibility. The Israelis would be out for blood. For years, the bombing of “Palestinian targets” and “terrorist bases” had been nothing short of a calculated campaign to terrorize the Lebanese. It worked. She was terrified.

“If they did all that for one ambassador, what would they have done for two, Mom?”

They took a taxi to Damascus that afternoon. She could see, from the high vantage point of the mountains, the planes attacking. This was not going to be a simple cleaning up.

They were at her brother's in Paris when the reports started coming through. She should have known. Two weeks after the withdrawal of the Israeli forces from the Sinai, they invaded Lebanon. Whenever clouds gather in the Middle East, it rains in Beirut. The price of peace between Egypt and Israel was operation Peace for Galilee.

At least this time, Najwa will not have to go through it.

By the time the Israeli siege of Beirut was in full force, after thousands of Lebanese had died, a small report, in the back pages of the
Times
of London, stated that the Israeli ambassador had recovered fully.

…

March 14th, 1986

Dear Diary,

Today, I couldn't stop laughing. Three months ago the Swiss ambassador moved into the sixth-floor apartment of the building in front of ours. Every day at six, the maid would bring him a beer, which he drinks on the balcony. I have watched him do this every day. Today, for the first time, when he finished drinking his beer, he threw the bottle out into the empty lot below. I couldn't stop laughing. He is Swiss. Today, he became Lebanese.

…

Mohammad was talented. There was no doubt about it. As I began to study his paintings, I realized he was even better than I thought. Most of the art critics who reviewed his work were not Lebanese. I felt they missed quite a bit in his paintings. I learned a thousand and one new things about his painting from their writing, yet they never asked what we saw.

The Baltimore Museum of Art bought one of his paintings and had it on display. Mark and I drove over to look at it. The painting consisted of a simple image, an upside-down jackass, or donkey, floating in water, submerged, with only the legs showing. The perspective was looking down from a high angle at the jackass, in seemingly infinite waters.

It was a beautiful painting. The size was 60 by 80 inches.

The reviewers waxed lyrical. They eulogized the mythological symbolism of the image. The jackass was a symbol of devotion or a symbol of beginnings. It represented The Fool or Magic. The fact that it was upside-down could mean homosexuality.
Upsidedown
and
invert
were once derogatory terms for homosexuals, one critic said. They wrote about the meaning of an animal exposing its belly. Surrender. The painting was about surrendering to the flow, surrendering to the unconscious, to life. The floating jackass was Zen-like. Since it was half-submerged, one critic suggested the artist was commenting on his mastery of both intellect and intuition, both technique and genius.

I do not have the acuity, or acumen, to pass judgment on what was written. I am not omniscient. I cannot comment on Mohammad's thought processes. He never talks about his paintings. I do know, however, something about the jackass. All Lebanese do.

The jackass should be considered Lebanon's symbol, its eagle. When I was growing up, you would see them all over the place, not as much in the large cities, but definitely in the villages and countryside. They were used for everything, from transporting villagers to plowing the olive groves. Everybody considered them stupid—jackasses, so to speak—yet they were methodical. I am positive most Lebanese would be outraged at the suggestion that the jackass be the national symbol, yet most of my memories of the mountains always include an image of a jackass, carrying a load or a villager, navigating the tortuous paths. The jackass as symbol of our peregrination.

I can already hear a Lebanese objecting to the jackass as symbol, since a Range Rover could do a better job.

As the civil war progressed, one would see less and less of the jackass. Whether they were easy targets for bullets or simply the victim of modernization, they no longer littered the mountainside. It is a shame.

Maybe the art critics were right. The painting could have been about surrendering to life. It is possible everyone was right. The painting could comment about homosexuality, suggest that we surrender to life, and, at the same time, mourn the death of a country. I cannot say, for I know very little about art.

…

While in Paris, Marwa sent a letter to a teenage magazine asking for a pen pal in the United States. She was eleven. She received a sweet letter from a Sarah Miller, age thirteen, from Des Moines, Iowa. In the letter, Sarah told Marwa about her life. The chores she had to do, the cute boys she liked, the new mall that opened, and other exciting occurrences in the happening town of Des Moines. Marwa found it amusing.