November 30, 2005
SOSÚA, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
The way Benny Katz tells it, like Saul on the road to Damascus, he had a vision on the road to Sosúa.
One perilous night, Katz, who was at the time a mechanic and motorcycle racer, was driving on the twisting mountain roads which lead to the D.R.’s north coast. These roads are totally unlit with many hairpin turns, and there are no barriers to prevent a driver from dropping off the edge to crash burning hundreds of feet into the pitch-dark valleys below.
Katz started hearing strange voices telling him he would never make it back to Sosúa.
Instead of stopping the car and collecting himself, which is what a boring norteamericano would do, he followed his Dominican instincts, kept driving, and called upon Jesus to get him through. “Jesus,” he prayed, “if you get me home safely, I will serve you for the rest of my life!”
At least, that’s the way he tells it.
Katz, who is now an insurance broker and candidate in the country’s congressional elections, might be excused for the use of a little hyperbole to fire up his campaign speeches. But that doesn’t lessen in any way his commitment to Jesus.
But he is also a Jew. “We are as Jewish as anybody else who believes in the Torah,” he says, referring to his Catholic wife and their children. “We just believe Christ is our savior.” The concept of wearing a yarmulke and prayer shawl and blowing a shofar as his kids bang on tambourines and his niece jams out a meringue tune on the keyboard while they sing about Jesus does not strike him as the least bit incongruous.
Katz’s father, Martin, was one of 645 German Jews who in 1940 accepted an invitation by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo to escape the Nazis and settle in Sosúa. Trujillo had originally intended to accept 100,000 Jews but found few takers, much to the detriment of those who probably later regretted not taking up his offer.
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Trujillo himself was just as much of a nut job as anybody else at that time. Three years prior to receiving the Jews, he had practiced a little ethnic cleansing of his own and ordered the massacre of 30,000 Haitians living on Dominican national territory, out of concern that they were polluting the gene pool. His concept for inviting the Jews in was that they would marry Dominican women and their children would lighten up the country’s racial composition. His embassies in Europe issued 5,000 visas to Jews but most of those jumped ship in the U.S. or Buenos Aires, and only a few hundred made it to Sosúa, which was at the time an isolated jungle on the north coast.
Those who arrived were awarded eighty acres of land, ten cows, a mule and a horse, paid for by American Jewish charities. They quickly figured out agriculture and became wealthy, forming a cooperative, Los Productos de Sosúa, which became the country’s main supplier of meat and dairy products.
Trujillo, who was himself assassinated in 1965, was right when he calculated that the Jewish men would marry local women and produce light-skinned children. The town of Sosúa was 100% Jewish until 1980, when the Puerto Plata airport was opened a short distance away and Sosúa was converted from agriculture to a resort destination. Those Jews who held real estate in what is now the chic, downtown quarter have gotten very rich.
As for their descendants, like Benny Katz, they are assimilating into the population. And like most people in this fervently devoted Catholic country, they are totally comfortable with Jesus.
But in the mind of this writer, there is one question that no amount of research has satisfactorily resolved.
On one hand you have Jews melting into the Catholic population. On the other you have the native Catholic population infused with the Santeria animist traditions that find their origins in the Yoruba people of West Africa. What will be the result of all of this cultural fusion?
Is it possible that somewhere in the mountains of Santo Domingo you will be likely to come across some freaked-out native rabbi waving a snake?
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November 29, 2005
The only way we are going to approach a resolution to the war in Iraq is through an international conference of all interested parties.
Short of a total collapse like the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan, no other result is possible.
Unlike Vietnam, there is no cohesive adversary ready to take possession of Iraq.
The fact that nobody either in government, the anti-war movement or the press has evolved to the point of even contemplating an international conference on Iraq shows how far we are from a resolution to the war.
From where we are now, the evolution of the Iraq war appears to be taking the following course:
• Ever-growing military morass
• Disarray in both the Republican and Democratic parties
• Possible military draft
• Grassroots domestic agitation against the war leading to popular reaction against the anti-war faction
• Increased police repression against anti-war elements
• Political collapse and precipitate withdrawal from Iraq
These events will take place not in a short span of time, but over the course of many years, allowing plenty of time for the pain to spread to every single American citizen. If history is any indication, we as a country will probably emerge from this painful process as clueless and naïve as we were when we started.
Thank you George W. Bush!
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November 28, 2005
SOSÚA, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
In a world of big ‘putas’ its impossible for a guy to have a little fun.
That’s what the little kid discovered, hands cuffed behind his back, as the cop called for a car to pick him up and take him to the ‘cárcel.’
A crowd of otherwise unoccupied Dominicans had gathered around to watch the diversion as the cop held the kid with a firm grip and spoke nervously into his cell phone. The little boy was letting out mournful wails of the type I never heard come out of a kid’s mouth before. They were the moans of an apprehended crook who knew where he was going and what trials awaited him there.
Magpie and I speedily walked past. If the crowd of men milling around decided that the kid was being treated with unnecessary roughness, all hell might break loose. Even in the best of times the Dominican Republic is a boiling cauldron of heat, poverty and the explosive nature of the population, of which the lid, the ever-present and massive presence of the various forces of order, was liable to blow off at any minute.
Here in Sosúa, about twenty-five kilometers east of Puerto Plata on the north coast, the outward appearances of life are those of an exotic tropical paradise. Brightly colored blossoms explode in the trees. Ocean breakers wash against the volcanic cliffs with picturesque drama. German and British tourists bask topless in hot tubs and on immaculate beaches sipping sweet rum cocktails.
In addition to the indigenous descendants of Spanish, Taino Indian and African slaves, there is a sizable and wealthy population of Germans. There is a Goethe Institute and a Jewish museum and synagogue for a community of Jews who were welcomed here in 1940 and stayed to make a sizable contribution to the country. Election posters solicit votes for one of them, the All-Dominican Benny Katz, in the upcoming national elections.
As Magpie and I continued our stroll down to the Sosúa municipal beachfront, we made way for a battered, antiquated police cruiser crammed with no less than eight cops, rushing to the crime scene. The Keystone Kops aspect of this heap loaded with cops sitting on each others’ laps dissolved when we got a look at their faces, which were tired, stressed, overheated and indifferent.
The Sosúa beachfront is one kilometer of palm-fringed white sand facing an emerald bay lined with condos and hotels perched on the edges of high volcanic lava cliffs. The day before, Magpie and I had scoured the whole bay in our snorkeling gear and found some very beautiful coral formations teeming with many varieties of fantastic marine life. The main coral, about 500 meters from shore, swung around in an arc, dotted with small islands of rock on either side. Schools of yellowjacks darted in and out between fan corals and large, orange flower-shaped corals. Fresh, new corals grafted themselves onto mature or moribund formations. Unusual blue-colored brain corals sat beside the normal white brain corals. White, doughy-looking formations formed underwater lagoons with schools of yellow fish swaying to and fro with the current while gaily colored parrot fish chewed on the edge of rocks. Long, stringy trumpet fish glided head-down, perpendicular to the bottom in their strategy to appear like strands of sea grass. Large, menacing sea urchins, some colored a lethal red, were displayed on ledges like spiked figurines in a boutique. Little purple fish with shiny blue dots and feathery little tails darted in and out between schools of giant violet fish as yellow-and-black striped sergeant-major fish approached us, seeking a handout. We observed large fish with red and green checkerboard patterns, odd-shaped black and white speckled solitary cowfish and flat flounders with intricate snake-like designs creeping carefully across the ocean floor. Large grey fish with serious expressions sized us up as potential meals. Schools of needlefish swimming directly beneath the surface brushed by our heads.
The joke of this is that these reefs, an easy swim from the beach, are a closely guarded secret of the snorkeling and diving operators who are in the business of trying to induce tourists to drop large sums of money to be transported to inferior sites farther away. The logic of this is: how can you get a guy to pay fifty dollars and then drive him out in the boat for one minute? So the tour operators pretend the reefs in the bay don’t exist and take the tourists the long way around to a minuscule patch of coral far away, like the New York taxi driver taking somebody to Manhattan by way of New Jersey and then charging $300.
On this day, however, snorkeling was not an option. The Sea God Poseidon was expressing his wrath and smashing breakers against the rocks and cliffs with dramatic fury. Magpie and I tried to swim, but the ferocious undertow swept our feet from under us and the waves knocked us over in a one-two combination that left us sprawled and winded in the sand, feeling lucky to still be alive. As we lay there, we were astonished to see a school of scuba divers appear on the surface of the water, obviously concerned about making it through the surf, weighted down by the heavy oxygen tanks strapped to their backs. One was knocked over by the breakers and dragged back into the surf. She couldn’t get up and needed quick help from her fellow divers. We determined to stay on dry land and go in search of a different class of wildlife, the two-legged variety.
This led us to the shanty town of shacks that line the beach road behind Sosúa beach, a phantasmagoria of open-air boutiques hawking cheap handicrafts and improvised beach bars where any drink might be your last. As stray dogs, which are a far cry from the cute little critters that populated Jacques Tati’s film “Trafic,” rooted through garbage and defecated freely on the otherwise immaculate sand beach, merengue and bachata music blared from boom boxes in the boutiques. Every step or two we were accosted by guys aggressively trying to lure us into the store using English, French or German.
“Come into my place. I want to show you something.”
“My friend, don’t you have one minute to look in my store?”
And the old favorite: “Do you remember me? We spoke yesterday.”
Blah blah blah. After a while you get the feeling of swatting away black flies in the African veldt, so numerous and pestilential do the hawkers come to seem.
Hookers ply their wares there, too, attractive young women in tight white jeans and pink tee-shirts with glittery slogans emblazoned across the front. “Baby Girl” they proclaim, and “Hôtesse de l’Air.” The girls navigate through the rutted path in high heels and gird their waists with cheap studded belts from China.
This routine of seedy of seedy rum bars and painted whores follows a tradition as old as Hispañola itself, going back to the days when it was a French colony under Louis XIV. In 1680, René-Robert Chevlier de la Salle, who had for the previous fifteen years explored and mapped the interior of North America from Montreal to Louisiana, received a commission from the Sun King to establish a fort at the mouth of the Mississippi and secure French possession of the whole continent except for the narrow band controlled by England along the Atlantic coast and the Spanish west. To ensure the success of the enterprise, the king had granted de la Salle three ships stocked with the provisions needed to establish and arm a fort, as well as sailors, soldiers and even marriageable women.
During the voyage across the Atlantic, one of the ships fell behind and when the two lead ships reached Saint Domingue, which was at that time a French colony, de la Salle moored them near Port au Prince to wait for the third to catch up.
As soon as the soldiers and sailors saw all the fun going on, with rum, whores, thievery, murder, voodoo and African marimba bands playing night and day, there was no getting them back on the program. A large number deserted and the rest came down with insidious strains of venereal disease that, along with various miscalculations (like the precise location of the mouth of the Mississippi, for example) and poor management skills on the part of de la Salle, caused him to be assassinated by one of his own investors and the rest of the colony to perish of cholera on the plains of Texas in a scenario reminiscent of the final act of Puccini’s opera Manon Lescaut.
Unfortunately, these lessons of history, of going crippled and blind, of penises dripping foul-smelling mofongo and falling off like leprosy, are lost on the latest generation of sexual adventurers, mild-mannered older European men for whom sexual stardom is just an economy-class ticket away. Back in their home countries of Norway or Germany, these guys couldn’t even get arrested for opening their greasy raincoats and exposing themselves on the subway, the cops probably just giving them a whack on the pee pee and sending them home. But here in the tropics, where twenty bucks will buy you a threesome, they sat together around outdoor café tables, shirtless with little wisps of hair lying limply on their sunken chests like some Cracked Magazine parody of Broadway Joe and the Rat Pack, surrounded by their cheap little coterie of teenage hookers. This is the globalization of sex, with the D.R. one of the main purveyors of cheap pussy to the industrialized world.
The barkeeper, a lovely Norwegian fellow named Tom, filled me in on the background: “Some of these men live here year ‘round. Others are here on vacation. They are not doing anything wrong, because the girls are all above the age of consent. They have to be – the police watch them very closely. If the police catch a man with an underage girl, it’s very bad. The cops are very greedy. They’ll lock you up and take everything you have and everything you can get your hands on before they’ll let you out.
“There are many police. The worst are the National Police. They shake down the girls as well as the tourists. Then there are the local police. Then there is the Politur, which is short for Policía Turistica. Those are the good police who protect tourists, though they don’t speak English.
“Then there is the Secret Police.
“The girls here have a very short window of opportunity to make money from the tourists. It’s not like Europe, where a woman can age and still be attractive. Here they start to decline when they get to age twenty. I’ve been here five years and sometimes I come across a girl I knew when I first arrived, and let me tell you, it’s shocking how they age!
“Most people here don’t live past fifty because of the heat and the hard life.”
At that moment, as if to illustrate his point, a crippled stroke victim hobbled by, supporting himself on an improvised cane, the whole left side of his body useless and twisted out of shape. He looked to be about thirty-five. There are many cripples and amputees stalking the streets of Sosúa. It’s not possible for me to draw a comparison to Cuba because I’m not permitted to travel there, but knowing what I have read about that country, that it has an extensive program of medical facilities, it’s unlikely that the Castro regime would permit such people to be left to rot on the street like garbage, to beg scraps from tourists until their accumulated maladies cause them to just die in filthy huts and gutters.
And the dogs! It’s a shock for a resident of the Upper East Side, where people dress their dogs in coats and hats, arrange play dates for them, where the dogs have their own reserved areas in parks and expensive day care centers to keep them entertained, where people shell out thousands of dollars for heart transplants for their animals, to see a world where nobody takes responsibility for homeless dogs. They are left to fend for themselves until they expire from misery and deprivation without even the most rudimentary animal welfare program! On one occasion, Magpie and I took a stroll to the outskirts of Sosúa. We had a wonderful time taking pictures of the cows and bulls that wandered freely out of their pastures and onto the road, as well as the free-ranging roosters and chickens, turkeys and pheasants. All of a sudden, Magpie brought me up short with a horrified gasp. “Oh my God!” she exclaimed.
Across our path hobbled a three-legged grey dog, one paw withered to a grotesque appendage. Covering the dog’s shoulders and extending back down the side of its grey body was a green, iridescent fungus reminiscent, Magpie said, of that which covers the fur of Sumatran rain forest sloths. The seasonal rains and pervasive humidity that dripped from every leaf caused this green fungus to slowly grow on the dog’s fur while it rested under its favorite bush. It could not reach to lick the fungus off. The dog loped with purpose, making its way toward an open air Methodist church where congregants were breaking for lunch.The dog was hoping for a handout.
As much as I love the D.R., its beautiful coral and its beaches, the foothills and mountains bursting with lush tropical foliation of every description, its breathtaking scenery that reveals an explosion of greens, browns, yellows and reds that are revealed with every turn in the road, the shades of lighting and perspective that would tax even the interpretive talents of a Gaugin or a Matisse to honorably depict it on canvas, that much do I detest the place for the curse that history has inflected upon it, the needless burden of exploitation, cruelty and suffering that has been allowed to eat away at its human and animal population like the wretched fungus eating away at the flesh of this pathetic, misbegotten dog!
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Posted on 11/28/2005
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November 27, 2005
Even from the standpoint of imperialists, George Bush and his gang are a bunch of blundering fools.
The reasoning for the Iraq war remains nebulous and indeterminate, unless you take the war party at their word. During the run-up to the war, back in March, 2003, I was working on a project at a major law firm. I used to eat lunch in the employees’ cafeteria, which was filled with very plump, self-satisfied matrons from the suburbs. These ladies not seeing any reason to speak discreetly, trumpeted their political opinions around the place like Tommy Dorsey playing “Moon Over Miami.”
I used to be serenaded with little masterpieces like:
“We’re gonna’ go in there and finish the job!”
And:
“Saddam Hussein had twelve years to knuckle under and he didn’t do it…”
In a nutshell, these sentiments, from the depths of George Bush’s white Republican base, more accurately illuminate the true logic of the Iraq adventure than all the position papers published by the Heritage Foundation ever could. Pure, naked aggression, rising like swamp gas from the souls of frustrated, overweight couch potatoes and ignited by the still smoldering ashes of Ground Zero.
All the specious pronunciations about WMDs and yellow cake uranium were just throwaway lines about which the speakers never expected to be held accountable. Hence their fury at now having to explain them
The only person happy about the Iraq mess is Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez. Seeing Bush hamstrung domestically and internationally, and Venezuela awash in petrodollars, Chavez now has a clear field to do practically anything he wants as Washington neo-conservatives grind their teeth in impotent outrage.
Contrary to official pronouncements about the ability to fight two wars, U.S. armed forces, stretched thin in Iraq, are in no position to simultaneously stage an invasion of Venezuela. Chavez, immensely popular there and in many other Latin American states, could count on support from elements of virtually every other country in the area, quickly regionalizing the conflict as well as REALLY disrupting world oil markets.
Clearly seeing a window of opportunity to consolidate his power far into the future, Chavez is signing cooperation agreements with the South American Mercosur trade block, has signed a contract to construct a gas pipeline 3,500 miles through Brazil to Argentina, is shopping for Argentine nuclear power plants and, not the least, has gone on a shopping spree for modern armaments and jet fighters.
This should ensure his ability to continue to kiss Fidel Castro and poke his thumbs into the eyes of George Bush for years. A far cry, this, from the time that Venezuela was considered to be a personal estancia of the Rockefeller family and Standard Oil of New Jersey!
For this bounty of good luck, U.S. forces tied down halfway around the world and disruption of oil markets causing the price of his oil to shoot through the roof, Chavez has only Bush and his brilliant coterie of dorks and misfits to thank.
Do you think he’ll send him a Christmas card?
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November 26, 2005
A few weeks ago I posted a blog called "Have We Had Enough of 9/11 Yet?" where I wrote that the war over the World Trade Center site was essentially a group of Bridge And Tunnel People fighting to assert control of New York real estate. My girlfriend, Magpie The Fire-Breathing Estonian Sea Monster, warned me not to write this for fear of inciting a powerful pressure group.
Now, the current edition of New York Magazine has an article entitled "The Bullies of Ground Zero" in which they essentially repeat everything I wrote weeks ago. The way they put it is that it is a war between blue-collar people and liberal intellectuals.
Call it whatever you want, I was way ahead of the conventional media on this interpretation. Last summer, when the media was praising Judith Miller for her heroic action in behalf of press freedom, I got a letter printed in AM-NY stating that she belonged in Bellevue, which eventually became the consensus opinion.
Stick with my blog. I am way ahead of the group. If you want to be able to assert opinions which turn out to be right way before they become fashionable, I am the guy to see. I know there is a lot of nonsense and stupid poetry on this site, but even those make sense if you take the time to reflect on them.
Thank you to everybody who chooses to waste their time reading my nonsense. 200motels
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Posted on 11/26/2005
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November 25, 2005
Steve McQueen has left us all, gone to fly away
Like when he robbed that Boston bank and loved Faye Dunaway,
And caught a plane down to Brazil,
And outsmarted all those cops,
We all knew then what we know now,
That Steve McQueen is tops
And when they locked him up in the Frenchmen's prison isle,
He didn't give up 'til he got free,
Although it took a while,
He spent ten years in solitaire,
But his spirit never broke,
He floated out on coconuts,
He always went for broke
Nobody could run him, he did things his own way,
Like when he stole that motorbike and nearly got away,
He tore up the German countryside,
And drove the nazis nuts,
They had to shoot him in the back,
Because he had more guts
In The Getaway he pushed his luck,
And ended up in a garbage truck,
And when it pushed him out the back,
You know he didn't give it up,
He shot down all those Texas creeps and ripped off all their bread,
And made it down to Mexico while they were lying dead
But now he's left us with our dreams,
To shoot across the sky,
On a cosmic golden chopper,
With wings to make it fly,
So when you hear the thunder on a god-forsaken night,
He's just tuning up his engine to get the timing right,
And if you see a shooting star spread sparks across the black,
It might just be his hot-rod Ford on a quarter-mile track,
They tell us that the good die young,
We accept it as a rule,
But why is it the best go first,
And not some other fool?
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Posted on 11/25/2005
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November 16, 2005
Beer in the morning is a beautiful thing
Your head might be in winter but your mouth is in spring
There’s nothing like beer to chase away the blues
After a couple of six packs you’ve got no mind to lose
The beer I have drunk is my best friend
We’ll be together until it pops out the other end
The wise men tell us you can’t buy beer just rent it
I wish I could be the guy who invent it
After thousands of years of research and struggle
The guy screamed “Eureka! I think it’s starting to bubble
“This beer’s gonna’ make me famous and rich
“But before that I'm gonna’ get drunk as a bitch!”
O Great God Budweiser please hear my plea
Let a Corona of Heinekin wash over me
On an island of pizza and fried onion rings
Make me a life raft of Buffalo wings
Deliver it all by a girl with big titties
And the finest big butt in all New York City
Send me some hot dogs and jalapeño poppers
And don’t forget the Big Macs and Burger King Whoppers
Budweiser Heineken Michelob too
I pledge my drunken soul to you
I don’t want no stinkin’ Mountain Dew
Just wash over me your golden shower
Let a thousand beer cans flower
Then I can belch around in perpetual motion
And fart through the sky like jet propulsion
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November 16, 2005
You’ve got to hand it to the Democrats – the blue ribbon for stupidity, I mean.
If the Republicans are following Richard Nixon’s game plan for disaster, circa 1969, where they are in perfect denial of reality about Iraq, the Democrats are stuck in Hubert Humphrey’s wagon rut about conning the people that there is a moderate solution to the war.
Read My Lips – continued engagement in Iraq will only lead to a regionalization of the conflict, collapse and disaster.
This whole mess is exactly following the Vietnam pattern: a declaration of war based on fraudulent information (Tonkin Gulf Resolution/WMDs) an ill-considered invasion, quagmire, regionalization, popular revolt (I mean HERE!), political collapse leading to impeachment and military collapse. The only distinction is that this time there is no draft to accelerate the process (not yet, anyway).
I saw Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat of Delaware, on TV yesterday and he was repeating the same old moderate, respectable, irrelevant position that we have to accelerate the capacity of the Iraqi army to take over the conflict from the American military. Forget it; there is no Iraqi army, just as there was no South Vietnamese army, just a bunch of colonial auxiliaries to the main show, which is an American show. When we left Vietnam, the puppet government collapsed, and this one will too.
Just as the Vietnam War spread into Cambodia and presaged chaos and slaughter in that country, this one shows signs of spreading into Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The shock is, the political commentators, who were alive during that epoch, seem to have forgotten all the lessons from it, and are now behaving with horror that the same thing is happening all over again.
There’s Only One Solution – an international conference including Iraq’s neighbors including, unfortunately, Iran as well as the European Union, Pakistan and India, and Russia; an international peacekeeping force, and American phased withdrawal. Nothing else is even remotely plausible.
Bush will never consider this, and the Democrats, seeking to present themselves as moderates in hopes of retaking congress, are too afraid of being labeled as unpatriotic.
That means that the pressure will continue to build at the grassroots level, just as it did in the 1960s, sweeping aside both parties, until it finally explodes into mass protests, police repression and the same kind of ugliness the country experienced in 1970.
The only mitigating circumstances might be a general collapse of the Bush administration stemming from endemic corruption. The Libby/Rove mess could expand to engulf Cheney. Senate Majority Leader Frist could be indicted for insider trading, following House Leader DeLay’s indictment. Bush’s Supreme Court nominee Alito could be shot down due to past conflict of interest and, finally, Bush himself could be dragged into the mess for any one of a number of reasons (take your choice: Judith Miller, pre-war intelligence, failing to act on 9/11 information).
The Republicans themselves might determine Bush to be a liability to their future prospects and initiate impeachment proceedings. That would be my guess. In the event Bush gets impeached, the war in Iraq would collapse and chaos would ensue.
I have no problem with taking over Iraqi oil reserves. Certainly, the Iraqis are not sympathetic victims. But the simple facts of the case are that it never could have succeeded, it has brought out the worst in us as a people, that it has made us look like imbeciles and buffoons in the eyes of the world and it has caused us to throw money and soldiers into a bottomless black hole.
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November 13, 2005
Hannibal the Cannibal
The baddest guard dog in the Bronx
If you mess with Hannibal
You're sure to get a bad response
When Hannibal was a little pup
His mama said to him
"Someday you will be the guard dog
Of the South Bronx Boxing Gym"
Boxing is the only sport
That Hannibal loves
He's even got a pair
Of custom-tailored canine boxing gloves
Don't drive down Tremont Avenue
When Hannibal's on guard
He'll chase you for a couple of blocks
And then he'll eat your car
Some folks say Mike Tyson
Will bite your ear and eat it
But Hannibal the Cannibal
Will bite your butt and beat it
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November 13, 2005
SCENARIO
Little Hairy Pothead signs on as a cabin boy on The Good Ship Lollypop. While The Good Ship Lollypop is sailing the South China Sea, it is attacked and overrun by The Chinese Opium Bandits.
The Chinese Opium Bandits take Hairy Pothead and throw him in The Orphanage for Chinese Opium Bandits in Shanghai.
In the Orphanage for Chinese Opium Bandits, they don’t feed the kids porridge – they give them opium suppositories. But they never give them enough to really get messed up.
One day Hairy Pothead is lying around in the Great Hall of The Orphanage for Chinese Opium Bandits with all the other little wasted orphans, hungry for more opium.
Two hundred bleary pairs of eyes watch as Hairy Pothead, emboldened by his desire for more dope, advances to the front of the hall where the Headmaster is standing, pulls down his little pants, bends over and plaintively whines:
“PLEASE SIR, MAY I HAVE SOME MORE?”
Check out my web site: www.200motels.net
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November 12, 2005
When I came to New York, it was with an ambition to get ahead and to have sex with charming, sophisticated women.
Instead, my experience has been akin to stepping through a movie screen into a traumatic psychological soap opera directed by Woody Allen in which all the characters are an emotional mess who are letting all their unsightly aspects hang out, like going onto a nude beach full of atrocious, blubbery people.
When I go to the gym, I like to take exercise classes because I find I get more done in a shorter space of time instead of schlendering around on my own.
Also, since the classes are mostly filled with women, it gives me a little bit of a thrill when they bend over in their spandex tights, which is a lot more fascinating then looking at a bunch of men’s butts, let me tell you! Ancient cultures, in their wisdom, determined that the world was composed of four elements: wind, water, air and earth. I would like to humbly propose a fifth primal element – women’s butts, which have the destructive force of a hurricane (as can attest anybody who has ever had a hat or a pair of sunglasses destroyed by one) or the alluring charm of a Venus fly trap. Ask Marc Anthony, the general or the salsa singer. I submit that it was not Helen’s face that plunged Greece into war, but the posterior end of her torso!
Yesterday I arrived a half-hour early by mistake, so I figured, rather than stand around like a house plant, I would find a pen and write a blog entry on the back of a class schedule.
I went over to the trainers’ desk intending to glom a pen that might be hanging around there, but, obviously, all the pens were hidden from sight. There was a knot of trainers standing nearby, so I went over to them and asked, “Does anybody have a pen or a pencil I can use for a coupla’ minutes?”
One of the trainers, an attractive, fit brunette woman, said “I have a pencil.” Then she asked, “Why do you need it?”
Duh! Well, nobody ever said you had to be a mental genius to be a fitness trainer. I said, “I have to write something.”
“What are you going to write it on?”
“I thought I would write it on the back of a class schedule.”
“What are you going to write?”
Unwilling to share with her the fact that I was going to stand there like a dork writing a stoopid blog, I became obstinate and closed, tightening up like a pair of testicles entering into a cold pool of water. “What do you want to know that for?,” I complained.
“Well, it’s my pencil!”
Now, when you ask me if I have a pencil, I either do or I don’t. I wouldn’t dream of forcing you to submit to a third-degree interrogation and reveal your most closely held boring secrets.
Finally, she relinquished the pencil. I walked over to the trainers’ desk to write. When I turned around, she was standing right there.
“What?!” I asked.
“I need the pencil.”
“Here! Thanks a lot!” I went around to another part of the gym and finally found a pen.
Maybe she was interested in me – I’m not too shabby. Maybe she figured she could interest me in some training sessions at $80.00 a pop, which is probably closer to the point. How come women always pick the most inopportune moments to get to me, and when I am all dolled up and hanging around in a bar, I get treated like methanol byproduct?
But it provoked in me a larger question, namely: whatever happened to the concept of “cool” in society, where you behave with restraint and finesse all the pieces into place?
Everywhere I go in New York I see people coming apart at the seams. Rudy Giuliani doesn’t like a piece of art, so he tries to destroy the museum. Neighborhood groups in Brooklyn try to scuttle a development project at the Atlantic rail yards, preferring an ugly gash in the earth to a new sports stadium and business complex. So-called “conservatives” try to block distribution of condoms in high schools because their hormones have dried up and they can’t figure out the logic of being young, so they try to prevent kids from having sex against all logic. Democrats defend the system of social promotion in schools even though the ultimate result of it is college graduates who can’t even read at a third grade level, rendering them useless as employees.
Everywhere you go, you see evidence of Loose Booty-ism: employees who refuse to focus and blame it on Attention Deficit Disorder: bosses who bring their personal problems to work and harass their subordinates; judges who blatantly solicit bribes; cops who frame people whom they know to be innocent; whole newspapers (I’m referring specifically to the Times) that are so disgracefully self-serving and corrupt that they deserve to be put under trusteeship for betraying the interest of millions of readers. The Times is so far over the hill with their Jayson Blairs, Judith Millers, Bill Kellers, Maureen Dowds et al, that it is no longer a viable vessel for relating news. If the Post or the Daily News behaved like that, with spoiled, self-indulgent neurotic twits running rampant and spilling their personal neuroses all over the place, they would have been laughed out of existence. Somehow, The Times still survives, resting on its past laurels (though if those were held up to scrutiny they might be found wanting as well).
Maybe New York is beyond salvation. Maybe they should just build a fence around it and declare it to be a toxic dump of self-indulgent dysfunction. Certainly it is not the New York I thought I was moving to, one of sophistication and artistic fervor; an economic and cultural powerhouse where new ideas and art forms could gain currency, instead of a dreadful pool of conformity and puritanical political correctness.
A long time ago I saw a television interview where the WASP moderator asked a couple of black jazz musicians, “Based on the fact that artists are good prognosticators of future social trends, what is your feeling about where we are heading?”
One of them responded “Bad, man, real bad!”
That’s how I feel right now. Bad, man!
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November 12, 2005
I went to the dance club Four Deuces last night
Somebody tried to rip me off and I got in a fight
This girl left by the back door with my new Ray-Ban sunglasses
The bouncers at the front door kicked twenty people's asses
Oh, I ain't goin' dancin' any more
Spend all my money, end up drunk on the floor
My shirt is ripped, my pants are burned, but at least I wasn't harmed
Next time I go dancing, I think that I'll go armed
The redhead in the satin suit piqued my imagination
And when we danced her bright blue eyes broadcast an invitation
But when she rubbed against me in the frenzy of the dance
She had a bulge the same as mine inside her satin pants
My girlfriends Pat and Julie left with two guys from the mob
They wanted me to come along and protect them from the slobs
I said "You girls are high, you're living in a momentary glory
but the looks on these guys' faces tells quite a different story"
My mother keeps on tellin' me
Meet a better class of people
But nobody has any class
All things being equal
When people go out drinking they leave their minds at home
There's no way you can go have fun and just be left alone
But I sure would like to spend time with that brunette named Ginette
And the Nepalese that Manny sells is (hack/cough) the best shit you can get
That blonde girl named Diane is a striking leather Venus
And Roxanne told me she'd like to get "something straight between us"
The only thing that's on my mind
My really only care
The only thing I can't decide
Is what I'm gonna' wear??!!!!
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November 10, 2005
Tu sais, je ne suis pas tout a fait d'accord avec ton analyse parce que, en France, peu de gens savent que Sarkozy est juif (et encore moins les jeunes qui font ces émeutes). Je ne crois pas que cela soit en relation avec ces soulèvements. Les "racailles" qui ont fait les émeutes de ces derniers jours n'ont pas grand-chose a voir avec le mouvement hip-hop, qui en France est plutôt positif et en tout cas pas vraiment raciste (contrairement à ce qui peu se passer aux USA). Si il y a effectivement des antisémites en France, il s'agit surtout des "skinheads" qui sont des groupes de néo-nazis à 100% blancs ! De plus, même si je n'approuve pas du tout ces émeutes, il faut savoir que c'est Sarkozy qui est à l'origine de ces soulèvements parce qu'il a tenu des propos racistes et injurieux envers toutes les populations des banlieues pauvres en disant qu'il allait "nettoyer au Karcher" et se "débarrasser de cette population" des cités (cela ressemble bien plus aux méthodes des Nazis). C'est ça qui a mis "le feu aux poudres". Car sa politique est très proche de celle de Le Pen ! En fait, Sarkozy n'est vraiment pas apprécié ici parce qu'il est très opportuniste et qu'il a l'image du politicien "avec les dents qui rayent le parquet" : il est très ambitieux et est prêt a imiter les méthodes politiques américaines qui ne sont pas très appréciées ici ! C'est pourquoi il fait plus peur que Le Pen(qui lui ne peut pas être élu en France car son passé est trop chargé de propos vraiment nazis). Il est également Maire de Neuilly (banlieue très riche de Paris) depuis plus de 15 ans où il n'a jamais fait construire de logements sociaux alors qu'une lois oblige en France toutes les villes a en construire au minimum 20% (là c'est l'architecte qui parle). Bref, je ne pense pas que ce conflit s'étende à d'autres secteurs car peu de gens approuvent les émeutes actuelles, sauf si il y a de nouvelles erreurs de Sarkozy et que ses propos "dérapent" encore !
MERCI A SPASM
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November 10, 2005
I insinuated on this page some weeks back that British Prime Minister Tony Blair might be the victim of a CIA blackmail plot, possibly involving a sexual indiscretion, which forced him to drag his unwilling country into the American invasion of Iraq.
I should have given more currency to the theory that the British PM is just plain off his rocker.
Blair lost a very important vote in parliament tonight that he had insisted on forcing through even as his closest advisors had told him for weeks that he was headed for defeat.
According to parliamentary tradition, when the government in power loses an important, say on the national budget or defense policy, the inference is that it no longer retains public support for its policies and the Prime Minister is either obliged to stand down and be replaced by another person in his party to assume authority, or that he go to the head of state, in this case the Queen, and request that she issue a decree dissolving parliament and mandating new elections.
(Is anybody out there still with me? No matter – it’s my blog)
The issue in this case was an anti-terrorism bill to increase the length of time a potential terrorist can be held in preventive detention without being charged from the present fourteen days to thirty day.
The position of the opposition parties was that fourteen days was sufficient time to hold a person without charges. Maybe they were afraid Blair was getting ready to set up a British Guantanamó. As one opposition legislator put it, “Name me one instance where the government needed additional time to charge a detainee!”
In this the opposition was joined by a substantial rump of Labor backbenchers, numbering about thirty, who were opposed to the legislation.
Blair, whose overwhelming majority was reduced by a hundred seats in the last election over his intransigent support of the Iraq war despite massive public opposition, refused to take into account the objection of a majority of British MPs or even to consider negotiating with them, say splitting the difference to twenty-one days. He mulishly forced a vote. Despite tremendous pressure from cabinet ministers and party whips, the legislation failed, causing a massive hemorrhage in government prestige and provoking Conservative demands that he immediately resign. Many members of Blair’s own Labor party, emboldened by his departure, concurred, publicly stating that either he start taking into account dissenting voices from his own back benches or it would be only a matter of time before he suffered another major defeat which would publicly humiliate him into resigning, or even force new elections. As one Labor MP put it, “I don’t want to change Tony Blair, but I want him to change.”
Maybe Blair is nuts, like a punch drunk fighter who insists he is ready for one more fight.
Or maybe he really is under some kind of coercive pressure from the Americans to continue supporting a useless effort in Iraq and is seeking a dignified way to remove himself from power.
Whatever the case, his time is short and he can kiss his limey ass goodbye.
Assuming a transfer of power to Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown is allowed to assume power without the whole Labor government collapsing, which would immediately reduce British Support for the Iraq war even as Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi looks for a back door to end the Italian military presence there, Blair’s replacement will seal George Bush’s international isolation even as he becomes totally irrelevant in this country.
Bereft of any international support, as even Republican legislators, fearful for their own prospects in 2006, continue to attack and abandon him, Bush can anticipate a long and winding road to oblivion unless Congress decides to ride him out of town on a rail even before his term ends.
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November 09, 2005
I took my baby out dancin'
Down to Forty Second Street
I took my baby out dancin'
Down to where they got the beat
My baby said "Wait for me daddy"
And then she went away
My baby said "Wait for me daddy"
Where she gone I cannot say
Since my baby left me
All I do is call her name
Since my baby left me
Forty Second Street is not the same
My baby done sent me a postcard
On the postmark it said Paris France
It said "Don't cry for me baby
You know we had a fine romance"
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November 08, 2005
Let's go down Forty Second Street
That's where the happy gay guys meet
It's a treat to beat your meat
On Forty Second Street
Forty Second is the place
Where the hookers sit on your face
Havin' AIDS ain't no disgrace
On Forty Second Street
Forty Second is so much fun
That's where the happy crackheads run
Bring a pipe and bring a gun
To Forty Second Street
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November 08, 2005
Reconnaissons que les soulèvements des banlieues sont, en partie, une guerre contre Sarkozy dues, en partie, au fait qu’il est juif. De son coté,celui-ci rend la monnaie aux jeunes émeutiers en les qualifiant de «racailles ». L’antisémitisme des cités, même si elles sont peuplées de
noirs et de magrébins, a ses racines dans l’antisémitisme classique européen, même si cela est camouflé derrière des expressions anticolonialistes. « Nous haïssons les juifs parce qu’il persécutent les palestiniens » expliquent certains. D’autres, plus réalistes, concèdent « On déteste les juifs, avec leur looks de fashion, parce qu’ils ont tout et on a rien. » C’est ca,l’antisémitisme de la cité. De ce point de vue, il est clair que la génération hip-hop est beaucoup plus proche du racisme de Le Pen que du fascisme de Bin Laden. (Aux Etats-Unis c’est pareil. L’antisémitisme répandu dans les ghettos noirs, véhiculé par certains groupuscules politiques tels que les "black muslims", est l’image reflétée de la société blanche) Et
si l’actuel Ministre de l’intérieur n’était pas d’origine juive, les émeutes éclateraient-elles avec une telle ardeur ? Certainement, Sarkozy a fourni aux manifestants une cible de perfection pour donner libre cours a leur colère. Chirac a préféré se taire, laissant Sarkozy se débrouiller tout seul(ou non) suivant ses capacités, mais évitant d'enflammer d’autres populations comme les étudiants et les syndicats, qui n’ont guère de sympathie pour le gouvernement. Si Sarkozy n’est pas en mesure
d’arrêter la contagion ce sera une déflagration générale, et quelle sera l'importance de responsabilité du démarrage antisémite des banlieusards ?
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November 07, 2005
The current riots in Paris follow the initial stages of the May 1968 riots in that they have been initiated by very young people of high school age. If the college students and disaffected white workers join in, then it is only a matter of time until the labor unions, who hate the Chirac government, get into the act. This reality is what is inhibiting the French government from stronger measures, like sending in the army.
President Chirac is prepared to let Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy be the point man for the government. If Sarkozy, a political rival of Chirac’s, proves unable to put down the disturbances, he will be discredited and Chirac or his handpicked successor, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, will be strengthened. If Sarkozy succeeds in restoring calm, Chirac will look to weaken him by other means. So far Sarkozy has foiled all Chirac’s attempts to render him irrelevant.
The rioters are not observant muslims. They are the hip-hop generation. But they are also virulent anti-semites. Many articles have been written in the French press about the anti-semitic sentiments of the young minorities living in the Seine St. Denis region. Sarkozy, who is of Jewish origin (his father was a former Foreign Legionnaire from Hungary and his mother was a Greek Jew), is a natural object of hate for these people. He has reciprocated their loathing by referring to them as “scum”. The media both in France and in the United States have avoided this angle out of political correctness, but it is nonetheless a reality.
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November 07, 2005
The Paris that Eponine was traveling to was different from the one that
we know today. It was a world of trouble and anxiety. Many of the
historical contradictions that France's leaders had stealthfully sidestepped
or postponed had finally overwhelmed their analytical powers. The
Corsican, Basque and Breton nationalist movements had formed an alliance
with resurgent Germanophile elements from the Alsace and were active in
the capitol, planting bombs and committing kidnappings and
assassinations. These areas of France were in open revolt, along with
other regions that felt neglected or exploited by the central authority.
The French armed forces were stretched to the breaking point containing
disruptions and riots which seemed to break out on a daily basis. Corsica
was uncontainable. The population had risen up in open revolt, forcing
the evacuation of all non-Corsican French, who saw their property
confiscated or blown up.
The French policy of double-dealing and duplicity in their relations with
the Arab and Sub-Saharan governments of Africa had finally exploded in
their face, and the large minority populations of the French urban
agglomerations provided a fertile recruiting ground for elements of a
treacherous and deadly fifth column of saboteurs and terrorist gangs who
haunted the dark streets of the popular quarters and the underground
train networks.
Reeling from the expense of providing security in this unstable
environment, the government had prevailed upon the European Central Bank
to increase the money supply, inflating the European currency and
threatening to spread the contagion to the other countries of Europe. The
welfare state had become unworkable and unemployment skyrocketed. Whole
quarters of Paris had become no-man's land, where armies of
squatters had dislodged residents and inhabited their property.
Barricades were set up where no agent of authority dare enter. These
areas became the so-called "Provisional Republics", which had their own
mayors, presidents or assemblies. Some were elected, some were just
dominated by the strongest clan or gang of thugs. There was the "Republic
of Belleville", "The Republic of St. Antoine" and so on. In some of these
"republics" relative order prevailed, but in others, like Clignancourt, it
was just partying and chaos all the time.
The government had recruited security forces wherever it was convenient.
Many CRS units were composed entirely of recruits from Eastern Europe who
spoke no French, were commanded by dubious officers and had no sympathy
for the French. Though the authorities referred to them as "auxiliaries",
in reality they considered these units to be the most reliable. The
native French security units, many of which were composed of pardoned
criminals and former football hooligans were posted in the immigrant
neighborhoods.
The conditions in the capital varied from block to block. One street
might contain raucous, garishly-dressed revolutionaries, self-proclaimed
"deguelasses" sporting the traditional red "bonnet stygian" of revolution,
openly brandishing automatic weapons, sabers and explosives; while one
street down a company of seething, black-uniformed security forces might
be poised, awaiting orders. On a third street life might be approaching
normal, with kids returning from lycee and people sunning themselves at
outdoor cafes.
Armed robbery, bank-heists and assault were endemic. The major car
manufacturers introduced lines of popular-priced armor-plated automobiles
for the mass market. Firearms and gasmasks became major fashion
accessories in coordinated pastel shades. Parisians, ever street-smart,
learned to dress inconspicuously and confined their movements to "axes de
securite", which were broadcast over the media the same as efficient
traffic routes, along with daily reports on the number of bodies found
floating in the Seine. Neighborhoods hired private security guards much
the same as in Rio or Johannesburg.
Nevertheless, even the most heavily-guarded quarters were not safe from
assaults and kidnappings because of the vast interconnected network of
catacombs, underground tunnels and abandoned mines, some dating back to
the original Roman colonists, which extended for literally hundreds of
kilometers in every direction, just a few meters beneath the streets of
the modern capital. Using this web of tunnels, it was possible to walk
from Montrouge to Chaillot by way of Montparnasse and Montmartre without
ever running into a police control. These catacombs, which contained the
bones of millions of Parisians who had died from the plague and other
disasters in past centuries, issued onto the street by way of obscure
passageways known only to initiates. Bands of terrorists would sneak out
onto the street, frequently in broad daylight and abduct people for
purposes of ransom or enslavement and then lead them, blindfolded, back to
their doom.
Parisians went to church and prayed for a return to the old ways, but in
their hearts they knew that these conditions did not just spring up from
nowhere. They were the result of a convergence of historical forces which
had been a long time building and which would have to be played out
with unpredictable results. Even the emergence of a strong man or an
authoritarian system of government would not have solved these problems
because the contributing causes were not confined to the borders of
France. As a result, people tried to hang on to the semblance of a normal
life. They became hardened to the possibility of losing friends,
acquaintances, family members. They celebrated birthdays, had
assignations in "hotels de passe", went to the theater, lived day-to-day.
Such was it, such has it ever been.
Mr. Rabinovitch had Eponine installed in al lovely studio on the rue des
Trois Magots in the peaceful fifteenth arrondissement.. It was a modest
but modern apartment on a quiet, tree-lined street that was closed to
traffic, with a police box on either corner. Eponine quickly became
caught up in the hectic routine of a Paris model. Most of her time was
taken up by hair, make-up and wardrobe consultations, and with grueling
photographic sessions which had to be endlessly reshot to conform to the
exacting demands of the creative team. Proofs were rejected out-of-hand
or sent to the computer artists to be retouched. The final product was
then sent back to the editors who derived new ideas and started the
project all over again. She was photographed standing up, sitting down,
indoors, at the beach in Normandy, in daylight, at night, around Paris or
in the country, against a starry sky or at a barricade surrounded by
revolutionaries. She was dressed in Dior, Gauthier, St. Laurent, La Croix
and Versace, with blonde hair, blue hair, fuchsia hair, green hair and no
hair. Her third eye was graphically shifted several millimeters around
her face, though only marginally, so as not to lose that certain je ne
sais quoi that "nature" had endowed her with.
Once she had been shot in every imaginable fashion and from every possible
angle, the job was given over to the technicians and creative editing
staff, and Eponine suddenly found herself with a lot of time on her hands,
though she was given a telephone and informed that she was on 24-hour
call, in case somebody came up with another bright idea for a new shot.
She was also instructed not to remove her sunglasses in public, even at
night, for fear of letting the cat out of the bag too soon in a city
swarming with designers and creative directors desperate for new
influences.
She had time to do all the touristy things, like Napoleon's tomb and the
Mona Lisa. She went shopping on Avenue Montaigne and at the Forum des
Halles. She enrolled in French lessons and ate mounds of cold
crustaceans at Place Clichy. She was instructed to confine her
movements to the "safe" arrondissements in the west of Paris and to avoid
the east and the neighborhoods on the far side of Sacre Coeur church.
Nevertheless, kids being what they are, she discovered the night clubs of
Paris, many of which are not located in the most lovely areas, the
attractions of the "liberated" zones having among them a total lack of
police presence.
In some of these places it was the wild west all over again, with night
clubs with names like Dodge City, where shoot-outs and "reglements de
compte" were nightly occurrences. Gangs of "motards", burly bikers with
kalashnikovs and bandoleers of ammunition strapped across their bodies
commanded the streets on huge bikes and shot each other up over sideways
looks or disputes over women and drug-dealing. Outlandishly-dressed
wolf-packs of kids armed with chains, knuckle-dusters and bayonets
assaulted anybody who looked like he might be holding a few euros, or
even if he didn't. Gang-rapes and kidnappings were the order of the day,
and an illicit economy based on narcotics and white slavery flourished.
All-in-all, it was a normal Saturday night.
Into this mess flowed Eponine and a few of her friends from the agency
who had pooled their money and rented a couple of armed bodyguards to
accompany them to the Club Corinthe on the rue Sauvequipeut in Bercy.
The Club Corinthe was a supermarket of vice under one roof where drugs,
sex and weapons were available to the one-stop shopper, accompanied by a
relentless, pounding Arab-Breton beat. People fornicated in the
leatherette banquettes, impervious to the still-warm cadavers of
freshly-overdosed junkies elongated right next to them. Articles of
discarded clothing and used condoms were strewn about the floor, as men
in various stages of undress chased about screaming blondes. People in
studded leather harnesses writhed in cages suspended from the ceiling.
Men in swings swooned in ecstasy as other men worried their fists into
their rectums.
"My goodness, what daddy would say if he saw me here now!", Eponine
declared. Ol' VD would not likely have approved. In his wildest,
whiskey-besotted hallucinations he could not have come close to
picturing a scene like this! America was a place where everybody went
to bed early and showed up for work on time so they could keep up with
their credit card payments. Even the perverts were moralists.
Not that it helped much. Like the rest of the world, the American economy
was teetering on the knife-edge of ruination, only bigger. After
decades of unrestrained looting of the treasury by successive right-wing
governments, the treasury was broke and the whole mess was only kept
afloat by the anticipated interest payments of a population of heavily
indebted credit card junkies, euphemistically referred to as consumers.
The only difference was that the security apparatus was more adept at
suppressing the insurrectionary tendencies of a populace that had been
bled white by usury.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Argentina had enjoyed the same
standard of living as the United States, and its future prospects were
bright - a hard-working and culturally elevated population, surrounded by
abundant natural resources on every side. However, decades of
mismanagement and stealing by an unthinking oligarchy denuded the economy
and led to chaos and dictatorship. It's an old saw that bears repeating:
those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat
them. Oligarchy leads to dictatorship and to ruination.
Eponine and her girlfriends sat in the semi-circular booth flanked by the
mean-looking bodyguards. They passed around joints of hash and drank
strong, liquorice-tasting green drinks. Frankly, they would've liked to
get up and dance, but the bodyguards, Arabs with scars on their faces,
cautioned them against it. A man came to the table dressed in a
slick-looking black silk suit, purple shirt and striped silk tie. He
also had levantine features and skin coloring. He asked Eponine in
French if she would like to dance. Eponine looked to the bodyguards and
they nodded that it would be allright. One told her, "Stay where we can
keep an eye on you."
They danced for a while. He told her that his name was Ali Muhammed and
that he was Egyptian. He spoke English. Ali invited Eponine for a drink
at the bar, and when she told him what the bodyguard had said, he told
her, "I'll take care of it." He led her back to the booth and started
speaking to the bodyguards peaceably in Arabic. They responded
argumentatively, but they all seemed to arrive at an accord. One of the
bodyguards discreetly opened his suit jacket to reveal a huge automatic
pistol stuck in the waistband of his pants.
"Pas de probleme", said Ali.
Ali lead Eponine to the crowded bar and ordered two drinks. "Why don't
you remove your sunglasses so I can see your eyes?", he asked.
"Can't do it. Doctor's orders."
"You like Paris?"
"Oh, yes!"
"Where do you live?"
"Quinzieme," said Eponine. "Where do you live?"
"Nation."
"Oh, my dear! Isn't that dangerous!"
"Bah! In my country I was policeman."
"What do you do in Paris," she asked.
"I teach."
"Teach what?"
"Tai Kwon Do. I was African heavyweight champion."
"I see what you mean. About not being afraid."
"I fear no man. What are you doing in Paris?"
"Photographic model for Agence Publicis."
"You must be very rich. Rich American. You marry me, we go to America."
"Do you want to live in America?"
"Everybody wants to live in America. I want to go to New York."
"What would you do in New York?"
"Security work. Teach Tai Kwon Do. I don't know. Everything. Do you
know New York?"
"I've never been to New York," she said, adding, "I'm from Houston."
"Aah, Texas. John Wayne."
"Right, John Wayne."
"Right, John Wayne, bang-bang. Apaches." He pronounced it a-pasch.
"Come again?"
"You know, A-pasch. Indians."
"Oh! We pronounce it ah-patch-ee."
"You know some?"
"I don't think there are any left."
"Where did they go?"
"They killed them."
"Oh."
"But we gotta' lotta' Mexicans."
"Why?"
"Silly, we're right over the border from Mexico. They swim over."
"You know some?"
"Lord, no!"
Some kind of mayhem was taking place at the end of the bar. A fight
had broken out and the security, such as it was, rushed over brandishing
clubs and pump-action shotguns. Ali put his arm around Eponine
protectively. "Come back to your table." He accompanied her back. The
two bodyguards, who were on their feet, started barking at him and
gesturing in the direction of the ruckus at the bar. One of them roughly
pushed Eponine into the booth next to her girlfriends.
Ali stood his ground calmly. He asked Eponine politely, "You give me your
phone number?"
"I'll give you my cell phone."
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Posted on 11/7/2005
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November 05, 2005
Since you left me baby I didn't know what to do
Spent the whole night trying to figure out how to get back close to you
Tried watching the late night movie, figured that might see me through
And thirty minutes later knew what's I's supposed to do
'Cause I was watching KING KONG, KING KONG
A crazy mixed up mother only tryin' to do his thing
Nobody understands him, all he wants to do is sing
They tried to shoot him down but he climbed up to the top
'Cause when a gorilla's got some talent he's impossible to stop
I went over to your house and I banged upon your door
You wouldn't let me in, I tore the boards out of the floor
I climbed right up the wall and stomped the hell out of the roof
Knew that you were entertaining but I didn't have the proof
'Cause I was watchin' King Kong
The cops came and tried to stop me but I trashed their rotten car
I stood up there and beat my chest like a Tarzan movie star
I swatted out the S.W.A.T. team like just so many fleas
Then the Air Force came and blew my ass right up into the trees
'Cause I was watching King Kong
So now I'm in the hospital and I got to go to court
My life is so messed up my parents can't do nothing for it
But when I watch a movie to try to get my mind off you, baby
I watch Bambi
Or Lassie
Anything but ...
King Kong, King Kong
A crazy mixed up mother only tryin' to do his thing
Nobody understands him all he wants to do is sing
They tried to shoot him down but he climbed up to the top
'Cause when a gorilla's got some talent he's impossible to stop
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November 02, 2005
My girl Betty used to be cool
'Til she went to martial arts school
Please Betty Baby I'm crawling out the door
My body just can't take these kicks and punches anymore
Betty leaped through the air like a tiger
She said, "My man don't leave me I'm hot like a fire"
Oo-ee Baby Oo-oo-ee
Please Betty Baby don't kill me!
Front kick round kick side kick punch
Betty kicked my butt for lunch
Now I'm in the hospital, Betty comes to see me
Betty says she's sorry and she says she'll never leave me
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Posted on 11/2/2005
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