MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"
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MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents" |
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Baltimore - 23 January, 2000 - Back in my sandbox again, are you? Very well. You came here on your own, so fasten your seat-belt. You have been warned.Long-time readers will recall that I blame much of what I have become on a septuagenarian woman, the mother of a state legislator, for whom my own mother was house-keeper and cook. I would, on occasion, act as this elderly woman's rose gardener in my youth. I was very young at the time. No more than 13 or so, I'm sure. It's difficult to remember much of my life --- beyond the books I ingested --- before I was sixteen, filled as it was with misery.
How that woman ruined me, I have always insisted, was giving me a copy of Errol Flynn's autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways. The book was not so much, though it included, Flynn as movie star. It was his final version of the tall tale which was his life.
Leaving home at an early age to work on a sheep ranch, gambling in New Zealand to win first a macao plantation where he learned the British art of supervision: put on starched khaki, bring the workers on parade, and pronounce, "Boss Boy, carry on!" Bored with plantation life, wagering the kit and kaboodle against a boat. The boat could be used for smuggling or to take film companies up river. "Acting; doesn't look like work at all!" A boat to England, some study, a boat to America and Hollywood. An affair with a Russian princess; smoking pot with Salvador Dali; being John Barrymore's roommate. Wives, children, sailing. The life of an adventurer. Errol Flynn! What was she thinking?
There are many calumnies about Flynn, most of them now documented lies. But worse, there are lies that Flynn produced about himself and his past. Like many the legendary figure, he couldn't resist creating a myth about himself. The result is that it is almost impossible now to separate what really happened from what either Flynn himself or his enemies fabricated.
FEED THE HUNGRY. You can help someone else in this world and IT WON'T COST YOU A DIME. If you simply remember to drop by The Hunger Site every day that you surf and click a simple button ONE LESS PERSON WILL GO HUNGRY. The food is distributed by the United Nations World Food Programme and paid for through the sponsorship of companies that care. Do your part.
I can only hope that some future commentator won't make the same statement about my own life. Because, yes, I have been an adventurer, too, and fool-hardy, too. I have made enemies, some of them powerful enemies. I have traveled extensively, restless, searching. And in the process I have created various versions of myself. Some of them are real.
As you'll see in Vox Populi, even my sister-in-law believes that I have lived as an adventurer. All because that old white woman gave me a copy of Errol Flynn when I was too young not to resist....
For our 200th edition the hot story of the week is from ADAM J. SMITH of the Drug Reform Coordination Network. It's a reprint from This Week Online, his column there which is already causing media buzz and making people take another look at the Gore-Bradley nomination race. You'll find it in Adam's regular slot, ON DRUGS.
The World's Magazine: g21.net
Event # 200: MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS
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When I think back to Cairo in the 1970s, three images immediately come to mind:Standing at my window at 4:30 in the morning and listening to the blinded-canary call of the muezzin, the Call to Prayer, and watching white doves rise across the globular top of a minaret at sunrise. Allah Akbar! God is Great! I sing the Perfection of God, the Many-named, the Beneficent, the All-Seeing. The Perfection of God! And the doves, moving as a flock, a song, suddenly turn and their white wings catch the rays of the rising sun and turn suddenly golden. It is Ramadan. The fast of renewal. I have been up all night and I am enraptured. The Perfection of God... Allah Akbar!
The essence of my life in Cairo seemed often encapsulated by Sharia Ramses (Ramses Square.) There you will find the mammoth statue dedicated to the great Pharaoh, looming above us all, monumental and impassive. History and legend melded together before the old railroad station. The place that I would take my fugitive roommate Wafah (a.k.a. Richard Damon) on his trip into the heart of Africa. The place I would come time and again to wonder about the mystery of Masra. I wrote somewhere, when I still believed I would be a novelist:
"The heat on Sharia Ramses rises in visible waves from the street and makes figures approaching or leaving the train station appear to be moving through liquid. It does the same to the garish, primary-colored film billboards that surround the square, to the dusty buses and trams weighed down to one side with people hanging from their outer shells, the donkeys pulling carts of watermelons going to the market or garbage led by the villagers who are Cairo's ubiquitous trash-pickers. Combined with the deafening noise of ten million, it is an hallucinatory vision
"A man leading a baboon by a leash across the square could have looked the same in 1954 or 1850 or 500 B.C. Only the towering and luminous statue of the dead pharaoh, Ramses, and the antiquated and equally imposing train station seem 'new' to me and a sign that Cairo can change..."
My third vision of Cairo is sailing up or down the Nile with my friend "Captain" Mohammed in the felucca with his son, Mahmet, and his daughter, Asa, smoking chi-chi (honeyed tobacco) spiked with flakes of hashish and listening to the legendary singer Oum al-Khalsoum. Mahmet would beat the drum, Mohammed and Asa would sing. The Captain had given the tiller of the small sailing vessel to me, and I had taken her into the wind...
The important thing to know about my life in Egypt was that all the people I knew were at least ten years my senior. I had a Fellowship and (supposedly) I was a writer. Nonetheless, they treated me as if I were an adult, though I had none of the experiences and disappointments of adulthood under my belt.
When I lived in Cairo, Arab Republic of Egypt, one of my missions was to meet Shirley Graham DuBois, widow of the African-American icon W.E.B. DuBois. I knew Madame DuBois, as we all called her, lived in a palatial apartment overlooking the Nile. She had moved there when she had been forced from Ghana. I also knew that it would not be easy for a twenty-something American to gain an audience from such a personage. (I claimed that I was a writer, but there for no reason for anyone else to do the same.)
But among my contacts in Cairo was Ez el-Din Shawkat, who worked for Al Ahram(The Pyramids), the semi-official newspaper of the country. (Yes, even then journalism was in my blood. I cultivated newspaper people.) And I knew Madame DuBois was a "get" that would be significant.
My good luck was that Salwa Shandy, Ez's fiance, and Madame DuBois were close. So it was through Salwa that I wheedled my way in.
The whole session, after the initial pleasantries, Madame DuBois's tour of her apartment (bought by depositing big "key money,") was a disaster. She thought that I was a typical uninformed American fool after I reminded her that the Egyptian 6th Army would have been trapped by the Israeli's in Gaza if not for the intervention of Henry Kissinger. She insisted that Libya's Gaddafi would have saved the day. I was foolish enough to reply that Gaddafi had *never* sent troops against Israel and if Anwar Sadat had depended on that he would have been a big fool indeed. As she ushered us out the door, Madame DuBois pulled Salwa aside to insist that I NEVER be brought into her presence again...
This week, while preparing this reminiscence, I learned through an article run in Al Ahram last year that documentary film-maker Atiat el-Abnoudi, my friend, and her husband the poet Abdelrahman el-Abnoudi have parted way.
I have searched the Web for Atiat and Abdelrahman over the years. I have made phone calls to Cairo. They informed my experience there in ways that few others did. I remember, even now, twenty-plus years later, their passion, their romance, their commitment to "our" cause. But I also remember the melancholy which shrouded them together. Abdelrahman, in the adoring public, with me in Cairo, was a romantic figure, a poet and songwriter admired by me and the masses. (Even though some people said, because of his arrests during the Nasser regime, "You will love Adnoudi, Rod --- but he is a little bit the Communist.")
And Atiat? Even then there was a sadness about her. It was a sadness which intruded on the playfulness which so charmed me at the time. I envied Abdelrahman her companionship. But I was a boy, barely over twenty, I would not have presumed to approach her and tell her my true feelings.
I remember vividly riding in a taxi to Captain Mohammed's felucca with them, for a sail to the Nilometer, and asking them how long they had been together. The three of us were crunched in the back seat. Abdelrahman looked over to me and said, "Ten years, and it seems like a century." Atiat took my hand, as we were seated next to each other, and said, "For me, it seems like only ten days."
At the time, Abdelrahman -- tall, handsome, revered and charismatic -- was the planet and Atiat was viewed as a mere satellite. Her film-making career was notable, yes, but she had only done a few films. The most notable among them, "The Horse in the Mud," had won international awards, but was not allowed to be screened in Egypt.
And then there was the fact that she was a self-confessed radical (When I first met her she was wearing a button which said, "I am Nixon-enemy # 123, 546, 786." When I first dined with them there was a picture of Ho Chi Minh on the wall overlooking the table.) who even flouted the traditions of her culture. ("It is not the custom to take the husband's last name here," she told me once when we were alone, "but I have done so to show my love for Abdelrahman.") She retains the surname "el Abnoudi" to this day.
In memory, it seems that I had the most significant experiences with Abdelrahman and Atiat when I was alone with either of them, not when the three of us were together...
As with most of my life in the world, when I was worldly rather than a Web Priest (as my friend in San Francisco, Yona, has dubbed me,) women and carousing were central to my existence. One of my Nigerian friends from the Press Center in Cairo made me aware that the best way to live, now that I had landed an apartment in the center of the city, was to have a Sudanese house-keeper. It was understood among most men of "our" class that she would not only cook and clean for me but also provide sexual services. So I hired "Mary." She slept with me the first night of her employment, but I felt that this was wrong. I was in love with my girlfriend back in the States.
So thereafter I slept with a series of prostitutes. I rationalized this by telling myself that I was "doing as the Romans do." No respectable woman in Cairo, despite all the disclaimers to the contrary that Egypt was not an Arab country, would have sex with a man who was not her husband --- and especially not one of us horny foreigners. I was less than twenty-five years old and sex was a *necessity.* So that meant sleeping with whores. I could live with that while in Egypt, I told myself.
It was also during this time that my pal from Al Ahram, Ez el-Din Shawkat, gave me the nickname "Bastard Pasha." It was a joke that stuck the whole time I lived in Cairo. The joke had to do with the fact that I was unusually foul-mouthed for a supposedly-cultured American. "Bullshit" was one of my favorite words, my Egyptian cronies decided. "Bastard," was in there, too. Especially when referring to Richard Nixon. Thus, "Bastard Pasha."
I miss that time in my life, and all of those people, every single day....
Hey, Kids! Check out this page. We want you to join us.
Things That Bother Me This Week
- That I can't coordinate both eating and sleeping to take place in the same 24 hour period most days.
- Dust. I'm constantly dusting now that winter is here. And the radiator which heats the apartment is noisy and a pain because it is too hot, so I open a window or turn the thing off --- and then it is too cold.
- Thinking maybe I need a housekeeper to keep up with things, then thinking but this place is so small. You should be able to do this yourself.
- This is nagging sense of impending doom...
- People who comment on an article without reading it in its entirety.
REMEMBER: Tell every single one of your friends about this Web site.
Why do we keep doing this? Because we like you.
Thanks for coming back this week."Work like you don't need the money,
"Love like you've never been hurt,
"Dance like no one is watching..."
Rod
This is another Web site made on a Macintosh.
EDITORIAL CORRECTIONS: Another good week. Let's hope I was as lucky this time.
ROD AMIS has published this magazine since 1990. It first appeared as a hardcopy 'Zine. In March, 1996, he launched it here on the Web. Rod was a Contributing Editor at Suite101.com, where he wrote the " 'Net Publishing" feature. His work has been featured in the San Francisco Bay Guardian Online, NRV8, and at WebLab's Reality Check site. Rod was also a contributing writer on technology for Faulkner Information Services.
Rod is now a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he writes on web design and development issues every Thursday. He is principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviews technology issues five days a week. His opinions on the Info Age began appearing on MethodFive's HYPER technology newsletter in March. 1999.
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