hesitation or difficulty to overcome. I knew the difference between a good deed and instant charity tossed like a cheap coin on a salver. “Let’s just say it made you happy to help me,” he added to cut short our discussion as we left Café Algiers one day after consuming five cups of coffee. His profuse thanks was probably meant to veil what he’d always suspected: that for me he was no more than a buddy in transit, while I was the long-lost sibling he never knew he had until we’d crossed paths in Café Algiers. “One day you’ll have to tell me why you’ve allowed me to be your friend,” he’d say, “and then I’ll tell you why as well. But you’ll have to speak first.” When he said things like this, I’d always throw him a vacant Come again? What are you talking about? stare. “One day,” he’d repeat after sizing up my intentionally blank gaze that hadn’t fooled him.
If we read each other so well it was also because the other thing that bound us was our very peculiar scorn for everything and everyone. Our scorn expressed itself differently, but it must have flowed from the same wellspring of self-hatred. Mine was a festering boil filled with bile and muted resentments; his erupted with rage. No one starts as a self-hater. But rack up all of your mistakes and take a large enough number of wrong turns in life and soon you stop trying to forgive yourself. Everywhere you look you find shame or failure staring back.
He had that. I had it too. Blunders everywhere, each damning in its small, insidious way. Blunders and bunk. Bunk was our protest, our way of talking back. He shouted bunk and boolsheet the way you pour alcohol over a wound you hoped wouldn’t grow worse. You said bunk to deal the first blow. To have the last word. To show there was more where that came from. To check out so you wouldn’t have to fold in front of the others. We shouted bunk at ourselves as well. Bunk was the last thing you said to shore up your pride, the last stop on a shaky landfill called dignity. After that, you wept.
I saw him weep twice. The first time was when he learned that his father in Tunis had been rushed to the hospital with peritonitis. After that, no letters, no phone calls, complete silence from Tunis. Meanwhile, here he was, holed up in far-flung Cambridge. He was, like a character in Casablanca , a stranded soul waiting for letters of transit that never came, striking up all manner of friendships in dubious establishments. Why was he in Casablanca? Well—as Bogart says in the film—he’d been misinformed. He should never have come here. But here he was, like a lone gunrunner in a world that had grown tired of galled, self-hating anti-heroes, because anti-heroes themselves had long become bunk and passé.
He was not crying for his father only. He was crying for himself, because he couldn’t take the first flight out to Tunis, because he couldn’t go back poorer than when he’d left seventeen years earlier, because leaving now meant he’d never be allowed back to the U.S., because he was ashamed of who he’d become. He was trapped. I had never seen someone pound his head with both fists before. But pound it he did, until I clenched his fists and told him, “Stop, stop, for the love of God stop hitting yourself.”
Neither of us believed in God. I put my arm around him. I had never done this before. He continued to sob against my shoulder, I could feel his chest heaving, and heaving again, then he burst out laughing. Twenty minutes later he was telling everyone in the café that he had sobbed in my arms like a woman, just like a woman, he repeated.
I knew what he was doing.
Behind his rage, his volcanic eruptions, and hyperbolic indictments of mankind whole, he had never grown up. He thought or pretended he had. The worst you could do to him was to spot the boy of seventeen. This is where his life had stopped. All the rest was error and bunk.
The second time I saw him weep came much
If we read each other so well it was also because the other thing that bound us was our very peculiar scorn for everything and everyone. Our scorn expressed itself differently, but it must have flowed from the same wellspring of self-hatred. Mine was a festering boil filled with bile and muted resentments; his erupted with rage. No one starts as a self-hater. But rack up all of your mistakes and take a large enough number of wrong turns in life and soon you stop trying to forgive yourself. Everywhere you look you find shame or failure staring back.
He had that. I had it too. Blunders everywhere, each damning in its small, insidious way. Blunders and bunk. Bunk was our protest, our way of talking back. He shouted bunk and boolsheet the way you pour alcohol over a wound you hoped wouldn’t grow worse. You said bunk to deal the first blow. To have the last word. To show there was more where that came from. To check out so you wouldn’t have to fold in front of the others. We shouted bunk at ourselves as well. Bunk was the last thing you said to shore up your pride, the last stop on a shaky landfill called dignity. After that, you wept.
I saw him weep twice. The first time was when he learned that his father in Tunis had been rushed to the hospital with peritonitis. After that, no letters, no phone calls, complete silence from Tunis. Meanwhile, here he was, holed up in far-flung Cambridge. He was, like a character in Casablanca , a stranded soul waiting for letters of transit that never came, striking up all manner of friendships in dubious establishments. Why was he in Casablanca? Well—as Bogart says in the film—he’d been misinformed. He should never have come here. But here he was, like a lone gunrunner in a world that had grown tired of galled, self-hating anti-heroes, because anti-heroes themselves had long become bunk and passé.
He was not crying for his father only. He was crying for himself, because he couldn’t take the first flight out to Tunis, because he couldn’t go back poorer than when he’d left seventeen years earlier, because leaving now meant he’d never be allowed back to the U.S., because he was ashamed of who he’d become. He was trapped. I had never seen someone pound his head with both fists before. But pound it he did, until I clenched his fists and told him, “Stop, stop, for the love of God stop hitting yourself.”
Neither of us believed in God. I put my arm around him. I had never done this before. He continued to sob against my shoulder, I could feel his chest heaving, and heaving again, then he burst out laughing. Twenty minutes later he was telling everyone in the café that he had sobbed in my arms like a woman, just like a woman, he repeated.
I knew what he was doing.
Behind his rage, his volcanic eruptions, and hyperbolic indictments of mankind whole, he had never grown up. He thought or pretended he had. The worst you could do to him was to spot the boy of seventeen. This is where his life had stopped. All the rest was error and bunk.
The second time I saw him weep came much
Similar Books
