Kerig's Korner

Friday, June 11, 2004:

From time to time I lose my head and write something for some magazine that actually excites me. Inevitably it bounces back with a request for rewrite from some editor. The comment is usually along the lines of: "I really like this, but we need less writing and description. Could you rewrite it with more facts and figures? We need to get stats and useful info into it. Oh, and compress it too. It's way too long. Thanks. Editor X."

Truth be known, this doesn't surprise nor anger me. It's the business and the gatekeepers are convinced that people no longer read, that they only want what's called "service information." The editors are probably right, though I sometimes I wonder if they're all promoting the same self-fulfilling prophecies.

Anyway, I give them what they want because I need the money. Yeah, I'm a writer of glorified lists. The Ten Best This, the Twelve Top That... Aw well, it beats selling Chevys. Occasionally, I write something that pleases me, just to please me, knowing that it'll come boomeranging back.

This is one of those ditties. You won't see it printed anywhere. So I post it here. Because it pleases me.

Hanging in a privileged spot on the wall of the Orca Adventure Lodge, which serves as base camp of Kevin Quinn’s Points North Heli Adventure operation, is a framed photograph of a slightly younger Quinn meting out fistfuls of puck justice. His hockey helmet is off, his gloves are on the ice, and it looks like he just landed a haymaker on some hack from the other team.
“That’s my favorite picture of Quinner,” says friend and fellow big-mountain skier Micah Black. “When he’s running the heli ski op he’s the nicest guy –– great manners around all the guests –– but you know there’s this other side to the guy. He was a professional cleaner, a guy who could go on the ice and clean house. I think he keeps the picture up there as a nice, friendly reminder to pay your bill.”
The bills for heli time, like the 1,000-mile expanse of raw, wild, Chugach Range that Points North accesses, can be huge. But Points North is not a place you come if you’re not ready to go big in every sense. Sitting on the eastern edge of Cordova, a frontier town on the Orca Inlet of Prince William Sound, this a place where winter nights are long and dreams run big. Always have.
A hundred years ago, gold, silver, and copper miners came out of the hills to blow their fortunes here. Fifty years ago, oilmen came out of Katalla, 47 miles south, to spray oil money like water. A deep port, Cordova’s always been a place of fish and fishermen, of whales and weather, and since Quinn opened up shop in 1997 it’s also a place for skiers who’ve come to find the ultimate.
To get there, you puddle-jump a flight from Anchorage or Seattle, meet the waiting van, and in two minutes you’re at the lodge, a former cannery built in 1887. The great unwinding begins as you shed the traveling clothes and pull out the polypro, the demin, the flannel. Voices are low and the free Gordon Beirsch beer is strong.
Draped around the sprawling lodge are skiers and snowboarders in various pantomimes of relaxation. You notice their calm, the languid fluidity of their movements. They’ve been up there and done it and now they can breathe, full and open. You start to sense that up here there’s nothing to prove to anyone, except maybe yourself. No one here cares about the Lexus or the size of your 401K. This is a new realm, a distant crossroads where adventurers meet to seek adventure, and solace.
Outside, impossible peaks seem to glow even as the night sky goes inky black. They haunt your dreams, bring palm sweats to breakfast, tickle your gut as you clomp out the front door of the lodge and onto the heli pad. Sea otters frolic in the waves as you board the A-Star 350.
Turbines crank, blades throbbing through the moist sea air. And then, in a rush of air and energy, the helicopter heaves itself upward. The lodge spins away and the mountainsides rush in. Ridiculously tall, pencil-pointed, they look like kindergarten crayon drawings. Suddenly that long safety spiel seems too short.
You look at the slopes and wonder how embarrassing it will be to come all the way up here, only to ride back down in the chopper. Then someone shouts “L.Z.” There are hand signals and a soft jolt as the skids touch down. A door is opened. The world is awash in white and you’re ducking your head, covering your goggles, wondering what the hell you’re doing here.
The ship lifts off, and then comes the quiet, everyone too awestruck to say anything; you’re on top of the world. And then with an immense outpouring of nervous energy the blabber starts again. Unstrapping your skis, you drop them in the snow. Click-click, means you’re ready.
A line is discussed, defined, and still it’s not real. It couldn’t be real. Then Quinn is over the edge and you’re following. Somewhere down there is a valley. Somewhere out there is the world. But nothing matters more than the turn beneath your feet. Make it. Breathe. Okay, make another one. And that’s the point of it. This is the moment. It’s now, it’s Alaska, and it’s all yours.


Bill // 8:15 AM

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Thursday, May 13, 2004:

Thirty-eight clicks south of Tijuana is a place where Abu this and Osama that recede wetly from memory, where the only rule of engagement is in relation to how hard you paddle and whether you go all the way to the bottom, or get down the line faster. It’s a place where the secrets are many, but gleaning them has nothing to do with donkeys or elephants. States of blue or red, or even which Yalie you support.

The break is called Rauol's for the Italian restaurant that sits on the bluff next to the highway at the exit. Down a dirt road with the requisite hungry curs, trailer/shacks, and barbed wire is a precipitous pitch of runneled ochre mud that slopes steeply toward the Pacific. At the bottom of the pitch, just before the fifty-foot drop to the rocky scag of beach, sits Ron's white pickup, and his girlfriend Cindy in the folding chair with the can of PBR. It's morning, but it doesn't matter, it's Mexico. Besides, she's got a job to do -- watch our trucks so that the windows don't get smashed (kids, petty thieves, etc.) as we ride waves.

The swell comes with metronomic regularity, every five minutes or so. A quintet of successively larger humps march toward three rubber-clad straddlers of fiberglass floats. The swell hits the reef and rears up, as if stung, before tossing forward in frothing white reaction. The rumble goes on down the line, triangulating the jutting ocean floor with booming, inarguable authority. The peak is fickle and I'm ignorant to its quirks. One moment it's here, the next, over there. This time slapping down in an insultingly brazen close-out. This time, offering its bare shoulders to a surfboard's caress.

Deaf to her whispers, clumsy with my caress -- so pale and pudgy from long days in the editing room -- I nonetheless find myself in the right spot. The two other surfers, gentlemen both (aged and patient as gray hair, sublime on their longboards) bow out and leave me this dance. Being goofy, I try for a left, but she's already covering that shoulder with a rough shrug. So I turn my back on her and hope she doesn't want to mosh.

Backside from the bottom I'm curving up her green shoulder and she's letting me. Inviting me for more. Topside she tickles with fingers of milky white. And the flirtation is on. The cuts and caresses, shoves and nods, the give and take. I can ride this wave forever. Except that I can't. It's only a moment. Only a flicker. But it and the week of fish tacos and sand and sun are enough to let all the dark things sink to the bottom of my now-lighter consciousness.

Back now. At my desk, creating stories out of digital flickers, sending messages to people I've never met. The distance from that wave is long (12 hours by car) but not insurmountable. Planning a season of shows now and trying to digest Israeli history before the next trip. It's dry work. But somewhere out there, there's a wave...



Bill // 10:49 AM

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Tuesday, April 27, 2004:

As I prepare for upcoming trips (surfing in Baja next week, and Israel this summer to shoot three more episodes of Byrning Borders ... Click on that 6/1/2003-6/30/2003 link over there on the right hand side of the page for archives of the last Byrning Borders shoot, in Beirut), I've been hooked on hockey. Specifically, to the second round contest between the Colorado Avalanche and the San Jose Sharks. Here's my opinion after watching the April 26 Sharks/Avs contest in Denver:

The NHL deserves what it gets. Instead of shaping hockey to spotlight its superstar players it has consistently worked against the athletes who bring people through the turnstile. In order to allow more franchises into the league, and to give teams in weaker economic zones a chance to compete, it has instituted rules and policies that favor systems over stars. The Forsbergs of the league are called by a more stringent set of rules than the Fibgers. Who's Fibiger? Exactly*.

And then there's all the glorious stuff that they just let happen. Clutch and grab instead of pass and shoot. The No Heroes League's policy is to let the impairment go, penalize the retaliation. Side with the grinders who goad the hockey gods.

You reap what you sow; the NHL has sprouted a crop of dumbed-down, assembly line hockey plants. The New Jersey Devils, the Minnesota Wild, the San Jose Sharks? Mechanized powerhouses of the left wing lock, the center ice trap. Flow-less hockey. Pedestrian puck. I'd rather watch paint dry.

"Play not to lose and wait for your chance" is the motto. Brings to mind a Thoreau quote: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind." Nail on the head, Henry David (you know the guy played some stick on frozen Walden Pond). Thing is, despairing men (meaning all of us, at some time or another) don't tune in for more despair. Doesn't Gary Bettman know we want escape and brilliance, not boredom?

Staring slack-jawed at the screen as the skilled Avs got out-machined by the lockstep Sharks was nothing less than the de-magic-ification of what heretofore had been a brilliant ballet of verve and velocity. So, let me be the first to offer a toast and bon voyage to the world's best hockey player, Peter Forsberg, as he leaves this pathetic league in favor of playing in a place where the game is still good. Foppa knows, deep in his heart, what we are only just waking up to: the NHL is dead.

The impending doom of the salary cap that will further strain out and dilute hockey's talent only bodes well for what's long overdue: The dissolution of the No High-scorers League. Maybe after its gone can another league -- a league where players can play and the clutch-and-grabbers will turn to pro wrestling where they belong -- put down roots.

Meantime, I only wonder what hockey package I have to sign up for to watch MoDo in the elite Swedish League.

* Jesse Fibiger,San Jose D-man/goon.
Bill // 8:23 AM

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Saturday, September 20, 2003:

Seas of sage, ashy green, like dust kitties under the wrinkled spread of Wyoming sky. A gray truck speeds. The cruise control doesn't work and my heel goes numb. Cruise doesn't work because I pulled the parking brake out. Came out in my hand. The handle in my hand. The light stays on. Forgotten thoughts come back. Humming tires chant unendingly. The driver unraveling. The me coming out of the driver. The person I once knew re-emerging from self-imposed exile of frenetic work ethic. The urge to move is the urge to simplify. Escape brings clarity. Traveling to see where we live. To feel again the deep ache of love, of missing, the anxious guilty ache of being missed. Of happiness and the impossible love for a child. Drawing toward far-off horizons pulls at the tangle of so many yesterdays. Knots untwist into a plotline of one's own life. And it almost all makes sense. And the wonder of wondering if you could see the pattern if you just acheived the right elevation... The truck vibrates above 90. A pickup is not meant for 90. Speed brings smiles. A taunt to invisible cops. The brake light says "brake" in red letters. Brake is broken. My heel goes to pins and needles and the sage bounces by.

Rawlings. Ten bars and one coffee shop. Vacancies at the core. Dusty empty indoor spaces. Chain stores at the edge. Empty Main Street. The church billboard reads: "Reliably fundamentalist." I picture a brimstone preacher, stiff upper lip in a crumbling town. Stick to fundamentals. God has his plan. The business loop has potholes. Sage-dry wind sweeps away a large fries box. Red and tumbling, like an amputated hand, a severed bloody dream. If I didn't have my own sadness I could bear to stop. But I do and I can't. Too much loss here. The empty box brings no notice. The drive-through espresso shop serves scalding progress in styrofoam. The woman is missing teeth. She gives directions. She knows how to get where I'm going. She sells caffiene and has a story to tell, but it's a drive-through and the Ram truck is big in the rearview.

Angling off onto the two-laner is better and feels like country and not merely space between places. Dipping down and curving and "Welcome to Colorado." And now at beloved brother Dan's and on the way to the first Colorado Avalanche hockey game of the season. Hockey. The glaring whiteness of the ice. The breathlessness of the crowd. The quick brutality. The sure honesty. It's hockey season again and life becomes sensible. With the snows and the snap comes clarity. The mushiness of summer is well frozen. Stiffened up. Fundamentals of frost and freezing. Colorado. Winter.

Dan's business card on the desk reads, "Lucky Kerig," which makes me think, if only for a moment, maybe we all are. Lucky that is.
Bill // 4:33 PM

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Tuesday, September 16, 2003:

I’m stuck in time. I spend each day returning to another day. A day that has already happened. A day that is seven thousand miles away, seventy days past. I go there through this small screen. I mouse around, dice, reorder, give absent people a presence and present people absence. Crop out the boom.

I am editing video of Beirut, assembling a tale. Or that’s the story I tell myself about what I am doing. I am stuck in a moment, trying to find ways to move characters up and down stairs, in and out of vehicles. I’m shaping, scoring, learning the mechanics as I go. I really don’t go anywhere. Just here. Into this small rectangle of active matrix.

I have a friend who thinks he’s discovered the holy grail. He thinks he created all the people he’s met. The successful ones anyway. Sees himself as Svengali meets Jesus, by way of Einstein’s salon. This friend is not made up. He is not a figment of my delusion. I didn’t edit him into being and he’s not going anywhere. He is locked up. Incarcerated. He scared people. Now he’s doing time. Stuck. He calls me from prison, but can’t get through on the cell, which is the only phone I have at work. When I go home for lunch there are ten messages, all from a computer. “You have a collect call from _____. This is a call from a correctional institute.” I can’t call back. I hope he calls when I’m there. I hope he doesn’t call. The doctor said psychotic break. The doctor said bi-polar. Delusional. Sometimes I just want to eat a salad.

I try to cut around the flaws in my Beirut story. I have a book to learn from. Final Cut Pro. It gives me tricks. Yesterday it was cross fades. “You are taking the long way home,” a different friend tells me. “Hire someone.” This friend is not in prison. He can call my cell phone any time. He calls maybe once a week. He is in a mountain cabin, waiting for some sort of deal to transpire, down on the flats, in dry rooms, out of the mountains. I wonder how much friction his days present. The terrible Teflon of waiting. This friend is not crazy, at least not so’s it would scare you.

I’ve been writing the same magazine stories for months. These are stories about people who slide well on white, crystallized water. Stories of skiing. Skis. Skiers. People who go up and down very fast. Slices of their lives. People who define themselves in relation to this sport. A man skis seven times a year and says he’s a skier. I ski seventy times a year and shun the label. At least he knows who he wants to be. There is no illusion of forward momentum in this work. A deadline plods. Mind cramp creeping ever closer.

In the morning I walk to work. The new office down at the corner. A steady stream of cars pass me as I walk. All headed downtown, to high buildings. I look at these people and wonder. Do they wonder if their efforts will ever pay off? Do we share that question? Do they listen to drive time? TV at night and two point four kids? Do they wonder at the wondrous? The horrible? The deadly dryness of these days? Do the feel the Fear? Do they ogle the newspaper, unable at times to believe that the shits are really running the world?

I shuttle video. Digitized images. I make enough for caffeinated products to keep me working. I'd say I was a rat like all the rest, except I love it. This new and different way to tell stories. Two unpublished novels sit on the hard drive. And now another spec concept. I have to give myself credit for the continued golden triumph of optimism over the gray shades of experience. The cars stream. I post video clips for my partner in New York to look at. Optimized clips for faster streaming. Each car has one person in it. Singular people, alone. They shuttling back and forth. Jog shuttle is one way to get around. Mousing works too. Then there are key strokes. All these finger punches move the characters. Tomorrow I'll learn match dissolve.

Outside the door, the office fills with human sounds. Stirrings of the other marginal characters. Living in the gummed up gutters of history is the best that can be hoped for. The incessant squawk of TV. The chatter of a printer. Monotone phone calls. Eeking out is the sound that comes through the thin walls.

On my desktop there’s a princess, an aging dowager peering from the corner, around the side of this blog. She’s been there, framed in her Final Cut window, watching me as I type. Her mouth is open, she is stopped in mid-speech. A Lebanese princess who CARES about ART. Art should have more than three letters. It should wear a bunch of honorary vowels around it’s neck. It's too big to balance on three legs. I've frozen the Princess in time. I control her. She wears a big, heavy beaded necklace that’s four hundred years old. Or should be. Or will be when I’m done with her. It’s a frock of some considerable design. Hand made. How many hours for some needle-pusher to make that? A tunic of time.

I don’t hate her, nor the opposite. Money is wardrobe that dresses a character in black. But that’s old thinking and I’ve used up my resentment. Except when I haven't. The Princess is a character to be moved through. A conflict to halt our hero for a moment, until he figures out how to hurdle her. He’s a big Irishman who, in my mind anyway, delivers as advertised. Which is to say, a good and solid guy. I'm making him into a product. A good solid product that you can trust. Travel with. Ride around on, like a Morgan horse.

The Princess didn’t want to be shot, until she did, and then we couldn’t get her to stop. A timeless torrent of Middle Eastern complaint. “How many American promises have not been realized?” The Arabs are like nonMormons in Salt Lake City. Nothing is their fault. Pot hole? Blame it on the Mormons. Air pollution? LDS polluters. Minorities manufacture licenses to moan. Oh the injustice. Arabs see western conspiracy behind every shortcoming, many of their own doing. There is truth to some of it. The western bullies. Bush is a bully like all bullies. Filled with fear of being found out. But that's not relevant to the point I veered toward, which is this: conspiracy thinking is only license for laziness, for half-thought-through arguments. At home the phone may be ringing. Computerized collect calls from prison.

Hours later I’ll see the evidence. Caller ID. You can never call back. My friend hasn’t said when he’s getting out. He’s stuck in the machinery, but he doesn’t mind prison. This is what he says. This is the only time he laughs. The doctors tell me he’s crazy, but who are they? Which pills are they taking? Pot is illegal but the whole population is on pills. How slippery our definitions of sanity. How changeable, dependent on the fits and spasms of the collective beast.

My inbox is all spam. Not a single message from a human. This is a first. I feel like the lines are cut. Sounds are smothered. I read the Times religiously, the international news is an obsession. All the world is American flavored, going low-cal. Atkins.

Here they’re suing kids for stealing music bytes. There the Middle East is cycling down. Unspeakable Jones for blood. When will Wesley Clark announce? He may be the only hope against these neocons. They’re starving the government beast. Starving the people. Feeding only monstrous lies. The Big Lie theory lived out daily. Even Hitler had his reasons. The insane have the advantage of singular, unshakeable conviction. “You’re either fer us or agin us.” My friend in prison says the world is a simple as geometric shapes. He’s got it all figured out. The Holy Grail is in the triangles. He created me too. Even God has his off days.

An acquaintance tells me I’m hyper-normal. Makes me wonder about him too. The woman at the coffee shop says I’m high maintenance. There’s another coffee shop across the street. It’s relentlessly anti-corporate, uniformly rebellious, filled with tattoo ink. I go there now. Tattoos dictate clothing. You drape them around your tattoos. Window dressing for skin art. The wifebeater tank is making a comeback. So many sleeveless Ts. I have no tattoos. I wear sleeves over my freckles. My grandmother told me they were angel kisses.

The Princess is waiting, accusing me with her lazy brown eyes. Procrastinating she says. And of course she’s right, but she has an agenda. A bone to pick with me. I have been cutting her down to size, parsing her words, catching her in the wrong light. I’ll send her out to the world with her bad side showing.

The media is tireless, rabid when ripping into the personal lives of our leaders. Timid as tit mice when it comes to digging into the truth of real issues. But then, those tales don’t sell space at the break, do they? I’m not even a member of the media. Not really. Below the radar is what they call it. Still on the grid, but below the radar. Just a consumer, a perfect American.

America is a bloated beast flattened with video tape. TV adds ten pounds. The beast is the color of boiled beef, or old Spam. Gelatinous gunk in shapeless suburbs where it's all curbs and no sidewalks. The beast has no mouth, only orifices, consumption holes. The beast is dry, climate controlled, yet it sweats sour milk into its seven hundred eyes that are all watching TV broadcasts of itself. The mute horror.

The Princess loved the camera. She showed us pictures of her with Marlon Brando. With American and British movie stars. She speaks of the Mamlouk period. “Mamlouk!” She delights in the sound of the word. “Mamlouk!” When I was skating the other day, playing hockey in the Sunday drop-in sessions, I heard her voice. “Mamlouk.” I was crossing the blue line. I didn’t have the puck. I was looking for a pass. “Mamlouk.” Coming through center, floating, cherry picking the breakaway. “Mamlouk.” Others voices call out.

“Adeem, adeem” says the brass man, another character I’ve been cutting. He waves over his shoulder to indicate something from long ago, the time of his grandfathers explains the translator. He pours molten brass into sand molds. I skate the blue line hearing Arabic. I don’t speak Arabic. The sand disperses the heat so he can crack open the molds. I am stuck in conversations that happened ten weeks ago. Stuckspace. A mind mould. Mold grows with time. Green like Ireland, where angel kisses come from. Time slides around me. Nearly nine and the stream of downtowners is slowing outside the window. The Princess needs to tell me something. I’ll give her a cross fade she won’t soon forget. SAVE and QUIT.













































Bill // 4:12 PM

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Friday, September 05, 2003:

Okay, so I know it's not good to gloat, but I gotta take a second to send this cyber smirk regarding our leader in chief and head frat boy. I am so pleased that cooler heads, namely Colin Powell's, seem to be getting a chance to step in and ask for help. Why he's only asking the UN and not NATO is beyond me, but that's beside the point.

My smile and glimmer of hope today, is that possibly Blowhard Bush will realize that style is substance and that supreme overwhelming arrogance has sucked since the Greeks invented it and gave it a fancy name (hubris) that 2000 years later would be crammed into term papers by legions of striving undergrads. But then our boy was too hungover in New Haven to make it to that class.

It is probably too late to salvage much of what our Axis-of-Evil a-hole has wrought, but hopefully this will spell the beginning of the end for Mr. Fer-Us-Or-Agin us. The only one who can beat him in the next election is him, and I think maybe there's a chance that will happen.

Okay, political tirade is over. You may resume your regularly scheduled life.
Bill // 9:58 AM

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Thursday, July 24, 2003:

July 3, 2003 - Vancouver
A phalanx of red and white flanks GM Place. It’s six am. We file in, endure speechifiying from every local politico. Then it’s the live closed circuit broadcast from Prague. We’re there for the announcement of the 2010 Olympics. Korea wins the first vote, but Salzburg is eliminated. Some whispers. What if we lose?
Then comes to the announcement. And FIREWORKS! We scream right along with them. We did it! A tear leaks from my eye. But wait, we’re not Canadian. What the hell are we happy about? Rational thoughts are fleeting. The 20,000-strong crowd dances its way into the streets.
Why aren’t we Canadian? I wonder. The following day Bel picks up the papers (Her mom’s a Canuck and she could be too).
I could live in Vancouver. This is the highest praise I can give a place. I could live here. I could. And with the current political landscape in America I am reminded of Richard Linklater's words: "To withdraw in disgust is not the same as apathy." Piss up your neck Mr. Bush and your neocon brown shirts, we're going where freedom still reigns.

July 4th,
We spend it in Whistler. I ride monorail ziplines through the tree tops and later fully suspended mountain bikes. Later, we drive the convertible back down to Vancouver.
The awning on the Chun Che Mei Café in Chinatown reads “YUMMY.” Who can argue with that? The yellowed floor has a film of slick, the air is humid with chicken fat smear. Yummy indeed. I am torn between the honeymoon yin yang fried rice and the oh so happy dumplings. They are the only two dishes on the handwritten list on the wall in English and my Mandarin is a bit rusty.
I pantomime an order. The counter gal, round faced with hair pulled severely back like some tennis player in training, yells louder, in Chinese, to help me understand. I try and order spare ribs and she understands it to be a question as to where she’s from.
“China, no Philippine,” she says.
Okay, I say.
“Some call Ling Philippine,” she says louder, to help me understand. “They drunk. Anyone can know I’m no Philippine.”
She caresses the film on the floor with a broom of greasy bristles. She needs me to know she is better than “Philippine people.” No matter who you are, or think you are, you always want to know that there is someone less fortunate, beautiful, smart, etc. than you are.
I walk out with enough to feed six. I have no idea what the dishes are.
We sit and eat them on a promontory with a harbour view in the greenness of Stanley Park. Chinese food in this Canadian port on Independence Day. Here's to you, America, our home and native land. We clink spare ribs and Grace squeals in delight.

Bill // 2:25 PM

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Victoria
June 30
I’ve arrived at the other side. Victoria, British Columbia. Though I have no globe to consult to see if Victoria is literally on the opposing pole to Lebanon, I am quite sure that this British colonial outpost off the northwest coast of the Washington is the metaphoric polar opposite of Beirut. This is a city of gardens. Thick hedges grow ready-trimmed, squared-off corners. Color guards of tulips and roses and deafodils. The plants, like the people, are filled with good sense, a high estimation of order, a traditionist's use of color. A city of starch and high tea and double-decker buses. Small, evenly spaced waves cross the harbour. The sensible green-gray of school blackboards. Even the ocean is organized.
The Fairmont Empress Hotel is 476-room citadel of turrets and ivy covered walls and creaking floors. Crystal baubles hang from chandeliers. Turn-of-the-century grandeur. High tea is in a high-ceilinged room of low furniture of antique design. Black and white photos of Queen Elizabeth and Shirley Temple and Bob Hope in formal evening wear hang in casual reference to a storied past. Tourists in T-shirts, clutching plastic bags of souvenirs read the inscriptions. What will tomorrow’s memories look like? Puffy people in T-shirts trying to reinvent an invented past.
There is a bay window our room. I sit in the window, hgh above the harbour. Curved windows, gauzey curtains stirring in the light sea breeze off the inner harbor. A tall ship in the harbor. More self-referencing artifacts of an antiseptic past. Victoria is Canada’s retirement capital.
Inside, faded gold paint on thick walls, heavy floral print drapes, mahogany desk and brass lamps. A two room-suite with harbor view for $800 a night.
My body is still on Beirut time, adhering to the movements of the sun on the other side of the earth. My head is somewhere in between. I find little purchase in luxury. I know where I am in streets of rubble, hot dirty air, the glare of dirty strangers.
Miniature ferry boats ply the harbor like a flotilla out of a Tolkien. Two-person sea kayaks slide by on the still gray-green surface. Masts poke into the smudged sky. The tall ship looks like an oil painting from another time. Heavy brush strokes, sharp outlines. Brisk air, filled with clarity.
Red and white flags flutter atop high imperial structures, on the antenna of the Bentley in the circular drive, from the hot dog cart where a man in a beret sells smoke-house dogs in whole wheat buns. Civilised here at the Harbour. Civilised means extra vowels, the substitution of the soft “s” for the angular sharpness of the trouble making “z.” Tomorrow is Canada day.
I’m lulled by temporary luxury. My girls order room service while I’m out at a fam trip function.
Martini making contest. As the only former bartender in the lot, I’m a ringer. Assuming the role, I organize a choreography for our six person team. One to pour. Me to shake and do Cocktail spins with the shaker, others to strain and garnish and narrate. We win, on the condition that I can pull off the spin in the front of the room without dousing the crowd. I do. The medal is made of sugar, in the shape of an Olympic medal.
Back in the yellow light of our room, Bel is fairly unimpressed. Grace has ripped apart the Daily Globe and Mail. She sits like Shiva in the middle of the shreds, on a crisp king-sized bed.


Steve Follis, husband of Heather, one of the Tourism Victoria people, takes me surfing in the Jordan River. He's a kick-back guy who jerks to life when talk turns to hockey. We sit on rounded rocks by a still inlet and wait for the tide to change. Finally it does and a small peak forms. We squeak into wetsuits. Gloves and booties. Neoprene hoods. Small waves cold water. The short board is alien to me. Air inside the suit makes me float forever. We talk hockey and wait for waves. Then it’s terrorism and its connection to religion. Paddling with water ballons where I should have hands. I ride all of two waves in an hour and a half.
Walking back up the bluff to the car, through trees as wide around as tanks, I feel reborn. A confirmed ocean zealot. Must find ways to surf more.
Bill // 2:19 PM

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Saturday, July 05, 2003:

My wife has gypsy blood; she jumps at any excuse to travel. Like a gypsy, however, she does not worry about the sticky bits. She has a vast disdain for passports, papers, tickets and itineraries – anything that smacks of bureaucracy and rules. Which is, of course, one of the many reasons I love her. A free spirit in a world of shackles.
So it should’ve come as no surprise to me when, two hours before our plane and sitting at a picnic at her parent’s house, she shrugged off my query as to where her passport was.
“We’re going to Canada,” she says nonchalantly. “It’s not like it’s Beirut.” Though she makes a good point I’m concerned that her attitude’s a bit too chill. A lifetime of trips to her relatives’ homes north of the border has left her unimpressed with divisions as meaningless as the U.S. Canadian border.
And papers for Grace? I ask.
“Look at her face,” says Bel, “it’s pretty obvious she’s your daughter.”
It’s been my experience that common sense assumptions such as this one generally lead to friction with those people who follow rules and not necessarily common sense. So, I zoom home, tip the house upside down, but still can’t find Grace’s birth certificate. The gypsy finds her passport and I stick it in my handy dandy little passport holder. She smirks at my organization.
“It only took me twenty years to get used to the difference in the way her mother and I travel,” says John Morgan, Bel’s Dad, as he drives us to the airport. He drops us off and says goodbye, but I tell him to be ready for the phone call; there’s no way they’re going to let us on the plane without any documentation for our eight-month old.
The counter for Delta’s Sky West Vancouver flight is at the end of the world. Though my wife, the gypsy, has managed to pack a week’s worth of wardrobe and the baby’s many togs into our two carry-ons, we’re sweating down our backs by the time we get to the gate.
I watch the ticket agent check passports of the passengers in front of us and shake my head.
“I should’ve had your Dad wait at the curb,” I say.
“C’mon Mr. Negative,” says the gypsy.
And so we step up and I slap our passports down. I wait for him to ask for Grace’s papers. A birth certificate maybe. But he only makes googly faces at her as he gives us our boarding passes.
“You see Mr. Negative,” says the gypsy. “No problem.”


“And the papers for the infant?” asks the customs agent in Vancouver.
“We don’t have any,” I say.
“Yes we do,” insists my gypsy, laying insurance bills on the counter. The customs agent skims the bills… yep, the kid’s name is on them … yep, the kid has the same last name … nope, these aren’t good enough.
There’s only one way through this situation: play the fool and let the civil servant vent.
“We didn’t know,” I say, opening myself up.
“You didn’t know that Canada was a foreign country?”
I shrug and take it. It’s got to be a lousy job. She’s pent up, taunt skin, hair in a bin. She can vent on me and feel better for a while.
“You didn’t suspect that you needed some proof that the infant is yours?”
I’ll find a dog to kick later.
The gypsy explains to her that we looked for the birth certificate this morning, but couldn’t find it.
“This morning? You didn’t look until this morning?”
The gypsy shrugs and smiles. I fantasize going to the dog pound to kick a whole pack of curs.
“We’ll have the baby’s grandmother fax up a copy,” offers my gypsy.
“The infant’s grandmother has the birth certificate?!”
“No, we’ll send her to the place to get one.”
The line behind us is backing up. I can feel the stares on my neck. The customs agent turns on me again.
“You’d better, sir, or you won’t be able to leave the country with the infant.”
“Oh we’ll leave the country,” I say, as if it’s some veiled threat.
“Next,” she says.

Bill // 1:34 PM

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It’s called a fam trip. “Fam” is short for familiarity. “A fam trip is an all-expense-paid junket offered to journalists to introduce them to a particular area, resort, or country. It’s a bribe.
The swap involves five-star hotel accommodations for hungry poverty-line journalists and ink (in the case of newspapers or magazines), or air (as in the case of TV and radio) for the organization. It’s a fair enough tradeoff and can be a mutually beneficial. Some can even be fun.
Unless, that is, you’re familiar with the living habits, quirks, and idiosyncrasies of other journalists. For the fam also involves extended periods spent with other hacks, just like you. There are reasons that people chose to sit in small spaces and type stories. It’s not because they are socially gifted. You’re average journalist’s report card probably said, “doesn’t play well with others.” Now imagine 45 of these types on a tour bus and you’ll get some idea of one of the reasons many journalists avoid fam trips.
When you’re young, however, and just learning to be a journalist you dream of being invited on such trips. When you are older and have been a journalist for a while, you realize that to accept a fam trip is also to define yourself as second rate; since top publications (the New York Times, the major network news organizations, etc.) don’t allow their people to attend fam trips they tend toward herds of hacks.
None of this stops me. I live for travel and love to be pitched ideas (it not only gives me fodder for my pitches, but often helps me hone my own hustle) by people who seem to care, if only for a moment, about what I think.
That’s not to say I don’t go in for certain ego defenses. The reality that top journos don’t accept fams necessitates frequent claims from us hack journalists along the order of “I never attend fam trips” or “I make it a rule to never accept such flagrant bribes.” Since the journo in question is likely to be sidling up to the seafood buffet and indeed has accepted the bribe, he or she must follow the first statement with an exceptional disclaimer such as “I decided to take this one because I needed some frivolous time away from my real work of documenting man’s inhumanity toward man.” To this you, the other hack, must reply, something along the lines of, “Yeah, I told my editors that they’d just have to muddle through the next Pulitzer without me.”
Real juice comes from turning down opulent fams, then, at the last minute, deigning to grace the place with your presence. In which case, it’s essential to call this to the attention of the other journalists.
“I turned them down three times.”
“Yeah, me too, then they just insisted and I decided what the hell, I need some space anyway. Man these oysters are good.”
But those were not the reason I had to turn down the first overture from Tourism British Columbia. The fam was built around the announcement of the host of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. Vancouver was a front runner. Though what little I’d seen of British Columbia may well have qualified it as one of my favorite places on earth, when the email invitation came, I wrote back and said that their fam trip was happening just three days after my return from Beirut. I took particular pleasure in including “Beirut”, as if that were just an ordinary thing for me and I was so world-weary and well traveled … if it’s a Monday in June this must be Beirut. Ah the games.
Anyway, I wrote back, thanking them for their gracious invitation, and saying that regretfully I’d have to pass. I couldn’t possibly take another week away from my young family.
“Bring them along,” came the reply.

Bill // 1:32 PM

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Friday, June 27, 2003:

I’ve left Beirut, but it hasn’t left me. Watching tape that we shot there I can’t help but play and replay moments, testing them against assumptions.

The camera jerks as Abu Hassan pulls the rattling Mercedes cab over without looking in his rearview. A cacophony of horns. A screech of the tires. He takes no notice.

I’ve asked him about the Hezbollah flags that flap in the traffic island. I’ve said something to the affect of “they’re terrorists.” The cab bumps to the curb.

“Listen, gentleman,” he says, turning in his seat and wagging a finger at me. “The Hezbollah is no terrorist. The Hezbollah drive the Isrealans out of the south. The Hezbollah make the school. The Hezbollah make the hospital that work on my little girl when she go blind.”

How am I going to argue with this? But, I read it in the New York Times. But they’re on our government’s terrorist list. I shake my head and work the camera, noticing the way he’s peaking the sound meter with each emotional outburst.

“Hezbollah, she’s no terrorist. Hezbollah, she’s the people.”

And I think that some of the people and groups that we in the West know of as extremists are 1) Not as extreme as we’re led to believe, 2) Deeply needed in the Arab world, and 3) Impossible to eradicate by brute force. The extremists will always be tolerated because they are needed in a deep down and basic way by the Arab world.

Many of the terrorist groups occupy the Robin Hood archetype in their societies. They strike the rich and the immoral while they take care of the poor. They build schools and hospitals with some of the money they make from the rich donors who write checks to assuage the guilt they feel for their own westernization.

These are the guys who car bombed 243 marines, I say.

“This is bad, sure,” he says. “But how many do the Isrealeans kill? Who stand up to them?”

Hezbollah?

"Yeahman." We both look up at the flag.

These are people whose governments have failed them with their corruption and graft. Can it be any coincidence that the 9-11 killers and Osama Bin Laden came from Saudi Arabia, the country that’s leaders have slid most noticeably and corruptibly toward the West?

The terrorist at least delivers what he promises. And the terrorist acts out a deeply repressed urge that every Arab must feel. The proud Arab world has been systematically humiliated for most of this century and the trend is only getting worse. Not only can it be conquered at will by imperial powers, but their own people defect to western values (so shallow and Godless) at an astonishing rate. I’m not just talking about Muslims. The same seems to be true of Middle Eastern Christians and Jews. These are people who’ve lost face and must secretly root for the man or woman who strikes back at the perpetrators of the crime.

We’re parked at a roundabout. Men sell watermelons out of the back of a truck. Abu Hassan gets out and buys one. The yellow Hezbollah flag with the raised machine gun flies from the lamp pole.

What Arab does not take some small measure of pride in the fanatic murderers who bravely strike back at the U.S.? None that I met would admit it, but most, I suspect felt that America got what it deserved and wouldn’t mind if it got a bit more of it. These “People of the Book” all share some repressed desire to see their nations rise again while they realize that the only future is to build reluctant bridges to the West. Even the most liberal and moderate must, deep down, resent that. I know I would.

Not that we’re above it. What American, even the most liberal lefty, can honestly claim not to have felt some small smidgeon of satisfaction as the first bomb fell on Afghanistan? Our psyches needed revenge and the terrorists needed to know that we are not as weak as they say we are. If they’re not convinced by now, well, by God, our fundamentalist leader will gladly decimate another country or two to show them that we are not Godless and the proof is in the fact that God has made us almighty. Which only increases the pool of fundamentalist extremists who will bravely blow up a shopping mall. And so on.

“My wife will like that,” says Abu Hassan. “She like the watermelon.”

Murderers only understand murder but you also cannot stop murderers with more murder. Especially this brand. An elephant is strong against another elephant, but useless against a bunch of snakes. If we didn’t learn that lesson in Vietnam, we could surely learn it from Israel’s debacle in Lebanon. How long will it take to move beyond Old Testament knee-jerks? How long until we can get leaders who dare to rethink things?

Abu Hassan puts the car back in gear and drives into the roundabout. “Don’t get me talking about the politic,” he says. “What do I know? The road is what I know.”

The blad tires screech weakly as we circle the roundabout and I turn the camera off.
Bill // 6:12 AM

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Thursday, June 26, 2003:

Daybreak and Ali is there with Ahmad's Benz. Ali is Ahmad's trusted driver, bodyguard, valet. Another luxury of the developing world. I haven't driven a car in a month, and I don't mind a bit. It isn’t so bad being driven around, especially by a guy who can handle a machine gun (and has one handy, just in case). The Benz thumps through Beirut's dawn.

The general takes us through customs. The soldiers wave. We exchange handshakes with the general. Chuuck-ran, our phonetic understanding of "thank you" in Arabic. Duty free wine and cigars for gifts. The gleaming new Airbus of Middle East Air. Byron's plane. I wonder if he's gotten over his ketchup kafuffle.

We rise out of Beirut with the sun and I search for a definition of the place. Beirut is ... well it's too many things at once. A place that defies simplification. Multi-dimensional, layered while ancient and scarred and somehow ever-fresh. And it is not theoretical. It is an actualized place. A place where its happened and happening and about to happen. Ideas are in motion. Ideas are in dispute. Ideas are action or they're nothing at all. Beirut is self-contained, confident and yet still rattled. Beirut's a self-starter. A place where taxi driver who never learned to write knows more than a Rhodes scholar. The ocean is calm, gun-metal blue. Beirut disappears over my right shoulder before any definition takes hold. Beirut is ... a memory.

Did I mention the wonderful service on Middle East Air? Did I mention the gleaming plane and the good food? It's brought into sharp relief by the sheer and utter disdain from the Air France crew.

Someone said we travel to better understand where we've been. After Beirut, New York is a well-oiled machine. It's slow motion. Order, interlinking cogs. New York is tidy. New York is easy. Cakewalk. Our driver is a Russian bear, a former Olympic Greco Roman wrestler who defected to the U.S. Every cabbie has a story. I think there's a show in that notion. More on that later. The Russian wrestler flips my 29 kilo bag into the trunk of his Lincoln. After Air France we're dying for nourishment so he takes us to an East Side deli for the best roast beef sandwich in NY. Thirty-seven bucks for two sandwiches and three Cokes. Welcome home.

The interminable day that began in Beirut ends with a Moet & Chandon toast amid flowering rose bushes in the penthouse garden at my good friend Peter Schweitzer's. The graceful champagne flutes. The old wooden water towers of lower roofs across the Upper West Side. City sounds. Faint taste of exhaust. Not a bullet hole in sight.

Tom Yellin and Peter and Erik and I drink in New York and talk about Beirut where they've both been, but not since the war. Peter was shot in the head in Beirut. Tom was shot at, but not hit. They talk like the newsmen they are. Events, not years, mark time. After this or that high jacking, before invasion X, catastrophe Y. I quickly bore them with stories of today's Beirut.

Guthrie, Peter's wife, has prepared a meal that looks too perfect to eat. If she brought her cooking oil to my restaurant I'd be pleased to use it.

I sleep like a man who's been shot in the head. We meet with Tom (who's also my partner in this show) at his ABC office. It's a quick meeting as he's got bigger fish that he's trying to fry. But we get what we came for: an atta-boy for Erik (well shot footage) and some direction for me in the writing. I can see the show in my head now and I think maybe we've got a shot.

Gina, who we've taken to calling "The Lovely and Talented Gina" greets us at Novita, her restaurant on the East Side. A wonderful meal and general agreement that Beirut was a special time that we'd all like to repeat. She won't let us pay. She'll always remain the "Lovely and Talented Gina."

One more flight. Home. Four letters never formed so good a word. My baby is asleep and beautiful. My wife is awake and beautiful ... I can't write any more without embarrassing myself with the sin of syrupy sentimentality.

Home. Mission accomplished.

The girls and I leave for Vancouver in three days ...

Bill // 12:26 PM

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Ahmad picks us up in his Benz. Kai is in the front seat, hands atwitter drumming to the music. Ahmad's scope of musical knowledge is vast -- a CD collection to match -- and to ride in his Benz is to roll to the beat. Even more so now; a high-speed mishap with a curb has left one of his tires way out of whack. A Benz with a beat. We pick up Rhea, a Lebanese dancer/actress, and head south to the secret fish joint.

There's always "the spot," the discovery that you share proudly with others and then later curse the poseurs who flood in and ruin it. But this place isn't ruined yet. And there's only one other group there on the cement slab porch under faded awnings next to the rocky beach. Florescent lights buzz and bathe the place in Wal-Mart light, which is somehow exotic and rare and ex-pat feeling in the warm sea air. Ahmad goes to a grocery store next door to buy his own cooking oil. He brings it into the kitchen to see which fish looks the best and to supervise the dumping of their used oil.

There's a freedom in the developing world that's long expired in most of the West. It's the freedom to do things that make sense, that are fun, regardless of rules. Ahmad is a chef who's never taken a cooking class. He blends wildly disparate ingredients with the authority of the self-trained. Imagine bringing your own cooking oil to Wolfgang Puck's. I already miss the anything-goes feeling of Beirut. Waves bubble in, roll pebbles down the sand in the suck-out. I throw a coin into the sea, an old sailor's tradition to ensure safe return. Erik follows suit. We both want to come back to Beirut. Imagine.

I ask Ahmad about getting our 70 tapes out of Lebanon. We skipped the permits that we were supposed to have to shoot here and I wonder aloud whether we'll get hassled at customs. Then Ahmad is on the phone in Arabic. Then he's off. "You're to meet the general at customs and he'll take you through."

Hummus with hot peppers. Baba ganoush. Arak (an anise-based Lebanese liquor) goes from clear to cloudy when Kai mixes water and ice. Says it kills bacteria in the digestive tract. I remember the goat tartar from ... when was that? Two weeks back? Time is Teflon here. Kai twirls the butter knife like a guy who's been trained to use knives. Ahmad sneers at the "gangsters" at the next table. Kai mentions his stint as an advance ranger in Afghanistan. He targeted infrared beams for bombers. No surprise in this land of surprises.

The usual political talk. Then the joke about I'm not with you guys. "I'm not saying this." "Speak into the microphone," says Kai, holding up his cell phone. "I don't think headquarters got all that."

Semi-free speech, but you gotta beware of the listeners. Old habits. Old jokes. Or not. The fish come whole, big ones and little. The small ones are sardines, I think. The bones crunch between my teeth. The big ones are tender enough to filet with your hands. Kai uses his knife.

"You guys are leaving," says Ahmad. "That's strange. You are part of the ... scene." He inserts pauses into his speech in the way that people do when they're searching for the right word in a second language. But he isn't searching, he's using the verbal ellipses for effect, to elevate a normal word just a skosh. It works and Erik and I share a look. "Part of the scene" is as good as it gets for a couple of Yanqui video voyeurs.

The Benz thump-thumps back to Beirut and for a moment there's a song on so loud and I'm drumming on a CD box and Erik on Rhea’s knee and Kai on the dashboard and Ahmad on the wheel. The empty highway. Whizzing lights passing in the night. The fleeting synchronicity of the shared groove.

It's decided that we need to go to Club Red to see Ramsay spin. A group consensus. A communal decision. But not for me. I ask to be dropped at the hotel. The shared groove is twenty clicks back and I have to get up in four hours.


Bill // 12:25 PM

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Sunday, June 22, 2003:

I could claim that the blind girl's picture didn't get to me, but that wasn't how it went down. Cruising Beirut with my new friend, Ahmad Al Arabia (Abu Hassan), we stop to play backgammon in his favorite haunt. Corrugated tin roof and a thatch cover on the front porch, where we sit and drink small doses of bitter black liquid (coffee is too holy a word to blaspheme). Abu Hassan barks in his gravel voice at the other man, Abu Ali, 70 and craggy nosed in a blue dolphin print shirt. At one point they wrestle. This is fun. I film it all (I'm thinking of using it in a different way than the rest of the footage. More on that some time later).

The cop wants to know what I'm doing. He looks a lot like Eric Estrada. I tell him I'm filming Abu Hassan. This brings a smile and a request not to film him, which I do anyway. Just because he looks so good and who's going to know the difference and anyway I'm really not scared of the cops here any more.

Abu Hassan wins a few games and then takes me to his house. We stop on his street and he shows me the gas station that he used to own, before the war. He had to sell it in 1976. With the war upon him he didn't get any where near what it was worth. He'd put every cent he had into that business. It was his one shot. Twenty-seven years later he's still driving a cab.

The buildings all around his are bullet-pocked. He shows me where he repaired his building with cement. It doesn't match, but at least the holes are filled. We go to the second floor and meet his wife. She's hunched and shy behind her head scarf, but after a few minutes she unpeels a real and genuine smile. Then it's picture time. Ahmad as a young man looks like a movie star. Pencil thin mustache. Slicked back hair. Ricky Ricardo of Beirut.
Then here are his five kids. This one, Hassan, is now in jail in Germany. He killed an Iranian man. He will be 52 when he gets out. Why did he kill the man, I ask. I don't know what happened between my boy and him. I don't know...

His finger shakes as he points to the framed photos. This kid is quiet, works for the government. This one gave us two more kids, one of him has kids. My cabbie is a great grandfather. This one is Rebecca, while she still had her sight. The kid is beautiful, doe eyed. I already fear what's coming.

Then it comes. The picture of the same girl at 16, when she should've been learning to drive. She has no pupils in her eyes. Only whites. She is blind, Ahmad explains. "Her eyes burned away from a car bomb." She was 11 and playing on the balcony of the apartment. We go out on the prefab cement balcony. "The car was down there. He blew up," says Ahmad. He blew up. I don't correct the pronoun misusage. Why, I ask.

"They try to get the communist who live in the building across the street." Who tried? "I don't fuggin know. The man he was in the mountains." He wasn't even home? "He was in the fuggin mountains and my girl she lose her eyes." Then the picture of the same girl, now a woman. She's in a cap and gown. White smile. White diploma. White eyes.

"Her doctorate," explains Ahmad proudly. And sadly.

Then more and more pictures and then: "Looking at all these makes me nervous," he says. Nervous? "Maybe not the right word." Sad? I offer. "Yeah man, fuggin sad. My pass is hard to see." Your pass? "Pass!" Grave bark, hoarse with emotion. Past? I ask. "Yeahman, fuggin past. You see what it do to my wife. She was beautiful. Now one boy in jail for murder. One girl blind. Why Bill? Can you tell me why?"

I can't tell him anything. Instead, I take video pictures that I'll show to other people. Voyeur guilt. I nod to him, feel my eyes welling up.

"The war she broke it all. The war she broke my life."

I turn the camera off.

Back at the hotel they're playing Michael Jackson by the pool. I swim in the ocean and then go to my room to pack. Yeah, the white eyes got to me today.

My last night in Beirut and I'm feeling heavy. The place finally got to me. The simple reality of car bombs and terrorists... Maybe I've been too long in the detatched realm of books and journalists and ex-pats, all with their own way of staying above and beyond the simple realities.

There's a man at table 340 by the pool. He's there every day. He's American, an aircraft leasing specialist who's in Beirut to reclaim an plane from Middle East Air. He drinks at the same table every night. His name is Byron. Small, well-trimmed gray mustache. Hagar slacks. A driver picks him up every morning and takes him to the airport where he works until it's time to retreat to the hotel. He has not ventured outside the hotel, nor the airport. He lives in a small world of westernized comfort, and fear. For some stupid reason, I try to tell him about Ahmad and the car bomb and the girl with the scorched eyes. He takes the story as proof that his isolation is the smart thing. He orders a hamburger, buys me a beer that I don't feel like drinking. He complains about the ketchup; why can't they just get it right?




















Bill // 9:57 AM

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Saturday, June 21, 2003:

The ocean is roiling, the chop is up. The wind whips the froth off the waves. The ladder from the resort into the ocean has a rope across it with a red flag on it. No swimming in the ocean, a man tells me. Too rough. Rough? This is rough? Obviously this guy's never gone to Crane's Beach or Nantucket or even Encinitas. I walk around to the other side of the breakwater and dive in. I swim along the shore line for a while. The ocean is beautifully bouyant and it feels like you could swim forever. The waves roll under.I float on my back. The morning sun is already high. There are no seagulls here, I notice. I wonder why. I swim some more.

Half a mile from the resort, I start looking at the shore and picking the place where I'll swim in. I notice the way the waves crash and suck back amongst shards of flat reef just below the surface. Okay, this is going to be a bit tricky getting in without getting smashed. I swim a ways more and see a place where there's a path between the flat reefs. I body surf a wave in between two of the reefs. Then it starts to suck back out. Diving down, I grab onto the reef and hold myself. With the next wave I get up and over it and get my feet under me. I'm surprised to find the reef is not sharp. It's flat, smooth. Moss covering cool stone.

I walk in ankle deep water along a curving line of reef. The coral is like cement. No, it is cement. And that strand of sea weed is not a strand of sea weed. It's barbed wire. I'm walking along a man-made bunker that's slipped down into the sea. Further along, men fish from former machine gun nests. A basket for the fish hanging on a rusted old pole. Broken glass cemented into the edge of the nests. The sea, over the 15 years since the war, has smoothed the glass. Beirut.


The side of the building has been blown away. It looks like a ten-story set for a sitcom, a giant doll house with one wall missing. Laundry flaps from clothes lines strung accross the openings. The afternoon sun bathes the exposed innards of the building. Ahmad Abu Hassan pulls the car over for me. I zoom in. Men sit in chairs, smoking and drinking from small white cups. Down two floors and over to the right a clatch of Muslim women cluster in a circle. Every floor has laundry. Red plastic chairs. They live in this bombed out building. I feel the guilt of the voyeur. Zooming in on the inside of their lives.

Refugees, Abu Hassan tells me. From the south. Palestinians. The men sit without looking at each other, like men do when the TV's on and there's a game coming through it. I imagine they're talking sports.

The Lebanese have not plowed the past under. They live on and around and in the past. Yet they look forward. The fire of hope still burns despite ridiculous circumstances. Beirut may have been the worst of what we can be, and it may also be the best of what we can be. There's a lot to this town. Enough to get a guy thinking.

Ahmad the taxi driver is also known as Ahmad Abu Hassan, which means "the father of Hassan." This seems like a good custom. A father taking the name of his son must go a long way toward making them both behave in ways that would not shame the other. My Dad would be Laurence Abu William. Come to think of it, he'd probably prefer Huck.

Abu Hassan tells me about the men he had to shoot when he was driving a cab here during the war. What side were the men you shot? I ask. He doesn't know. He just knows that they were trying to take his cab. The bullet scar in his arm goes through the tricep.

His daughter was blinded my a car bomb. Hezbollah ran the hospital that treated her. Hezbollah has paid for her eye surgeries. Hezbollah runs the school she goes to. The U.S. government has Hezbollah on its list of terrorist organizations. Hezbollah took "credit" for the 243 U.S. Marines that were killed by a truck bomb during the war.
Abu Hassan takes us shopping in a neighborhood with Hezbollah flags flying all the way down the median. Every shop keeper is glad to see us. Not one is concerned that we're Americans. There's a recession on and we have money. They're friendlier than most shopkeepers in Utah.

I'm ready to go home, but I will miss the relevance, the vitality of this place. I won't, however, miss being a walking dollar sign. I'm looking forward to a place where, for better or worse, I am faceless in the obscurity of the working class. One more day, inchalla (Arabic for God willing).






Bill // 4:39 AM

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In a Jewish cemetary on the Green Line, the demarcation between East and West Beirut (Christian and Muslim, respectively). All around this overgrown plot of land are bullet and bomb-riddled buildings. But inside the cemetary all is in tact. The graves bear the Star of David, minorahs, Hebrew writing. Except for a few bulletholes, the cemetary remains unmarred. The white Lebanese marble of the headstones is free of graffitti.I'm amazed that none of the symbols of Judiasm have been smashed. The most recent grave has a headstone engraved with the date 2002. Jews still live in die here. And the Lebanese, who've been invaded by the Isrealis and had some 50,000 killed by them, have respected the graves of the Jews. Amazing.

On the other side of a crumbling wall is a Protestant cemetary. This is a place where Jews and Christians have lived together for centuries. The names on both sides of the crumbling wall are Arab names.

A Muslim woman tends the cemetary. She is young, head scarf tied tight. She comes up to me. Smiles. Shy. Wants to see what I'm doing. A Muslim tending the Jewish cemetary in Beirut. A town of contradictions. Nothing is as it appears. She is a squatter, probably a refugee from the south. Anna and Nabil had told there would be some of these people there. The woman touches my forearm, smiles for the camera. I pan over. She touches my hand. This is confusing too. Then she makes it clear with the universal symbol of thumb rubbing forefinger. Money. She wants money. I shake my head, indicating I'll give her some. Several guys stand in a far corner, watching what's going on. I decide not reach in my pocket until I get to the gate of this high-walled and very private place where three guys versus one gringo with a camera seem like long odds.

I walk. The woman grabs me. Okay, there goes her tip. I point toward the gate and nod yes. Now she is yelling at me in Arabic. I smile a lot and keep walking. Now she's screaming for someone. I suspect it's for a husband. One foot in front of the other. She shoves me as hard as she can. It's a good shove and I stumble back. The guys in the corner of the cemetary seem amused. Then another man appears. Her husband, or maybe her brother. She tells him what's up. I smile and shrug at him. He shrugs back. As I'm near the gate I reach in my pocket and pull out some money. The woman grabs for it. But her husband smacks her forearm away from my money.

"Sorry," he says in English. "Sorry." I shrug and say no problem. I hand him the money, but he won't take it. "Welcome," he says, "welcome."

As I walk out of the gate his wife is screaming at him.


Bill // 3:51 AM

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Thursday, June 19, 2003:

Spy is not a cool word to use. That's the first thing of consequence that the American military attache tells me. We're upstairs in Fennel, Ahmad's tre chic restaurant in downtown Beirut. We're seated on low stools of white leather, in a white room with electronic music for white noise. The crowd is white. In black mostly. An artist exhibition is going on in the other part of the loft. I only see one "ïnstallation", a projection of a miniDV time lapse shot of cars whooshing past, jostling green bushes. Video as art. I retreat back to the low stool. The attache is a major, a West Point guy, in a pressed button-down. Spy he says is prejorative. He is an open information gatherer. His job is to cull useful fact from the sea of conflicting messages. Gotta be like herding cats, I figure. Then he shows me the way he travels. Three body guards, Suburban with tinted windows. Guns aplenty. The information that cracks this gauntlet must be fairly thin and simple.

Present at the fete: Kai the Norwegian bomb sweeper, Anna and Nabil (artist and architect), Roula (architect), G. Patrick Wood (Humanitarian Mine Action Coordinator for the U.S. Embassy Beirut, who's probably worth more words but I dont have the time right now.) Kai and Patrick talk shop, perhaps for my benefit. They explain the different types of landmines and how to dismantle them. The clink of glasses, the susurus of cocktail chatter. The Isrealis have given the Lebanese maps of all the mines they laid in Lebanon. But the various militias didn't. Patrick says the U.N. claims there are one million mines still in the ground in Lebanon. Kai skoffs. Patrick laughs right along with him. I don't get the joke. The U.N., Kai explains, is a business just like all these governments are businesses. More mines more donations. More money. They have mine sweeping machines sitting in warehouses. Never used. The U.N. is the mother of all corruption. It all drifts downhill into the NGOs.

I remember the other Patrick, the Byrne one, referring to the NGO mafia. I'm starting to get it. Kai's company sells land mines as well as land mine sweepers. The U.N.'s donations soar in times of strife. Peace would tighten purse strings. NGOs would go out of business if peace and prosperity every flourished. The Lebanese wine is as good as anything in Paris, someone says. Boys aged from nine to thirteen are the most common victims of mines left behind. There is no profit in peace.

Canapes come on trays. The artist in the next room entertains Beirut's potetial patrons. The military attache isn't allowed to bring his family with him to Beirut. He left a year and a half ago when his son was four months old. Ï was standing on the Blue Line today," he says. I can't help but think of hockey and the tragedy of the Devils winning this year's cup. But he's talking about a different game. In his the Blue Line is the division between Isreal and Lebanon.

What do you make of the missile attack on the TV station? I ask. Don't make too much of it," says G. Patrick Wood. "Personal,"says Micheal the military attache. "This place is as safe as its been in ten years."Yet he still checks under his car for bombs before he gets in. He tells a story of two men who are being chased by a cheetah. One stops to put on his sneakers. The other asks why, he'll never outrun a cheetah. I don't have to outrun the cheetah, I only have to outrun you.I can't help but think that Erik and I already wear the sneakers and that with big fat targets like this guy in the Suburban who would ever bother a couple of grubby gringos with little cameras?

Sometimes it just feels like I'm living inside the movie Casablanca,"says Anna." Though I can't remember the movie, I agree with the sense of it. Art organized my vague movie memories.

Now in the air-conditioned loft of the Virgin megastore on the former Green Line. Ahmad the 71 year old taxi driver is sitting next to me drinking coffee. "This is the first time in this building since before the war. This was for opera, for cinema. This building was stronger than others. It made it through. Outside, the bulletholes have been patched with stucco that down't quite patch. Still it's swank. "It is beautiful,"says Ahmad. "Feels like in the movies." He stares at the giant posters of Eminem and 50 Cent. Virgin. This afternoon we're going to visit a family that lives in an alley and makes plaster casts of the Virgin Mary. Virgin is not a word I'll ever associate with Beirut. This city is quite the opposite...

















Bill // 2:33 AM

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Tuesday, June 17, 2003:

Father's Day in Beirut
The Christian Militia man told me about the missiles. It was early in the morning, sevenish, and already it was hot. The heat comes here in the morning and stays well through midnight. Maybe it never leaves. Anyway, it was already warm and the power was out in the hotel. I took the stairs down with an odd sense of foreboding. My first Father's Day as a father and I'm seven times zones away from my lovely girls. There was that and there was something more. I didn't have to wait long.

They bombed the TV building, he said with the pride of the messenger. "Shot missiles into it. Blew it, but didn't kill nobody." The glee of the guy who gets to burst bubbles. "And also there was militia fighting last night too." Your militia? I ask. Muslims, he spits. I meet his skinny friend and get in the car to go to mass. Which Muslims? I ask. "Two sides," says the skinny guy who with teeth gone crooked from too much grinding, "who care? No one killed. Wounded."

"Who care?" says my friend. Who care?

Who bombed the TV station? I ask. "We will know soon," he says as if he has a secret and unassailable source. "Soon, it become clear."

We drive across the Green Line that separates Christian Beirut from Muslim Beirut. The Roman Catholic mass was in Arabic. Chanted throughout. Interesting how much it sounds like Muslims prayers. There are signs with drawings of cell phones with red circles around them and a slash through the middle. They're taped to the marble columns. The sermon is about using the Internet correctly, to please God. The host tastes like cake.

We walk the streets of the Christian side and the militian men tell me about miracles. Modern day miracles of cured cancer and blind being made to see. Not metaphoric, modern, actual. "Do I believe?" They want to know. Sure I do. Sure. At least I believe that they believe. There is no doubting that.

"You see the difference between our side and the Muslims? You see how they live? You see how many childrens they have?" There's a deliberate, syllogistic momentum to this tack of conversation. They get to the punch line quickly. We hate Muslims, you understand "hate?" I tell them I do. I believe, I say. Believe, they say. I believe they really hate. Then come the reasons. A brother shot, a father. Bombs. How can a generation that's participated in this get past it?

Shaba and Shatila? I ask, mentioning the two Palestinian camps where Christian Philangists massacred unarmed Muslim men, women, and children while the Isreali army stood guard (and looked the other way). After a few rounds of this questioning from me, it comes out that they were both at Shaba. But they didn't do anything. So they say. Anyway, they say, it wasn't the Christians, it was the Syrians. This is another Lebanese technique: blame the interloper, blame the imperialists, blame the other religions, the puppetmasters. The justification of the oppressed to do anything they damn well please.

After a while in their neighborhood, I say it's time to go back to the hotel to get Erik. Breakfast? My friend asks. Back at the hotel, with Erik. Reluctantly they drive me back across the Green Line. They are annoyed that I have not signed up for their hatred of Muslims. I am slightly wigged. They are guys with nothing to lose. Guys screwed up by deaths of brothers and friends. Guys with no education who have no jobs in the recession. No wives, no girlfriends either. But they have guns and a lot of time on their hands. The skinny one starts telling me about the worldwide Muslim conspiracy. He has facts. Numbers. The Michigan Muslim Militia is something we'd better watch in the U.S. I ask him where he gets his information. The Internet. Where on the Internet? Yahoo chat rooms. I think back on the priest's sermon.

It should be noted at this point that I was suffering dysentary and a bit of bronchitis and was generally and thoroughly worn out. I share this detail now as a way of qualifying my observations. I felt weak as a wet kitten, the perennial fraidy cat.

I cook my own eggs in the hotel kitchen. They can't seem to do sunny side up, so I show them. Eyes, they say. Call it eyes. Okay, two eyes and toast, if you please.
More poltical talk. I mostly listen to the hatred. They can't understand how I could be Christian and not want to kill Muslims. It seems so obvious. Bush, they tell me, he gets it. They love Bush because he is killing Muslims. George Bush is the strong man. George Bush? "Good as God."
I tell them I have work to do. We will be back later, they say. We see you soon.

Me? I think not. I don't like be drawn into this type of thing. And yet you don't want to confront strangers. Time to switch hotels. This one's getting old anyway.

The Riveria Beirut is a French-owned, French-filled and slightly tacky joint right on the ocean. Now we're bourgesias in Beirut. There's a tunnel under the street that leads to the pool and the breakwater and the ocean. It's Sunday afternoon-packed. Seventies disco music blaring. Lots of leathery skin. A plainly American family with little kids in Osh Kosh Begosh trunks. French man in a New England Patriots hat. Lebanese princess in a NY Yankees cap worn backwards. From the militia men to a Bain de Soliel commercial in twenty short minutes.

Dinner at an Indian restaurant with Kai, the Norwegian mine sweeper. Portly and ebullient, he can crack wise in five languages. One of those expat types who covers his big heart with joyful cynicism (really), and self deprecation, and when those don't work there's always copious consumption of booze. A great guy, despite his insistence that he's not. The wide window is open, a thick breeze rolls off the ocean like sauce. I head home to get some sleep before we have to get up and shoot Patrick leaving at 3 in the morning.

Ahmad and Patrick look at pictures of Brian W., who was the third in their trio. Brian the NBA star is dead now, shot by his brother on a boat in the ocean. They miss him. They keep his memory alive with their friendship. Two men forever joined by a ghost and some snapshots. Then it's time to go. Waiting for the elevator, Patrick asks Ahmad, do you think it could all blow up here all over again? It's the big question. Lebanese have been asking it for a decade. Now, with the shifting of the plates of power in the Middle East, anything could happen. Lebanon is either a model of peaceful Middle East cohabitation or a powder keg waiting to blow. Depends who you talk to, and which moment you pick to speak with them.

Do I think it could happen again? repeats Ahmad. Yes. Definitely. The next few months will be very interesting. If it does, says Patrick, don't ride this one out. Come to America.

And then we're outside where Patrick's brother Hassan, has arrrived with a cadre of cops. Just for the cameras, they've arranged a police escort to the airport. Zooming through empty streets with four cars surrounding Ahmad's Mercedes it's easy to believe we're close to something, or someone, important. I'm sitting in the passenger seat at that place where the surreal meets the real. Our driver, the captain, hits 140 km an hour on the highway. Then he opens his door and with foot on the gas and one hand on the wheel, he stands up and looks over the roof of the car. We're zooming along as he's yelling over the roof at one of the other cars. What the hell's wrong with the radio!? I want to ask. Not that it would matter because we don't share a language. The car drifts back and forth on the empty road. He yells at the other cars. There's a 45 pistol stuck in the back of his belt. I glance back at Erik to see if he's shooting it. He is. I calculate the effect of grabbing the wheel. Then the guy swings back in, swerving the car (a souped up Bronco) and almost sideswiping Ahmad's Benz in the process. What a cowboy. Man oh man, what a cowboy! Anyway, the shots looked great.

Patrick eschews the Western handshake and kisses everyone on the cheek three times. Then he's gone and we're back in with the captain. He zooms us back to our hotel at a hundred miles an hour. Back in our bourgesious billeting it takes two hours for the adrenaline of the day to give way to exhaustion. Happy Father's Day. What a surreal day.

Breakfast is by the pool. Thatched roof. American buffet. Scrambled eggs. Canned fruit and Raisin Bran. Arabic music plays from the outdoor speakers. We spend the day regrouping.

Erik is sick. He's coughing much worse than I've been. Dysentary symptoms too. He can't get out of bed. I call Anna (when in doubt, call a mom) and she calls a doctor for us. The doctor comes and examines Erik. Severe bronchitis and dysentary. Erik goes to bed for a few days.

The paper reports that responsibility for the missile attack was taken by Ansar Allah (translation: Partisans of God). Who? No one knows. It's a brand new group. Or not. Every kind of speculation follows. Hariri, the prime minister who owns the TV station did it himself. The Syrians. The Isrealis. A personal vendetta. A rival TV station. Iranians unhappy with something that was reported that was critical of them. The one thing that everyone agrees on is that there is "no scenario." It's a one-time thing. It's not the beginning of something. What we'd call an unrelated incident.

And the militia fighting? It seems that's just a gang fight. Another non scenario.
I am feeling stronger now and the things that seemed like threats only a couple days ago now seem harmless.

Beirut by night. The corniche promenade with men selling corn on the cob and giant beans with toothpicks instead of forks. Muslim women jogging in head scarves. Kids selling balloons and that third world staple: CHICKLETS. Lebanese soldiers with Russian guns guard MacDonalds. Rollerbladers. Kids play soccer with dads on the board walk. Bearded men selling Turkish coffee. There are no guards at Starbucks. Nor at Hardy's the Hard Rock Cafe or the Virgin Mega Store.

Can't resist the Hard Rock. Guitars on the walls. Pictures of Prince and U2 and the Stones. Could be Vegas or NY. Except for the fat Japanese man singing bad kareoke into a cordless microphone.

A six-seat sushi joint plays Wagner. Colorful plate of tuna and yellow tail and eel and a California roll with cold Al Maza beer for five bucks. Muslim family comes in and I give them my stool. Anerican, they ask. How couldja tell? My brother is in Detriot. We love Americans. Such close people. Close? Okay.

The high walls of the American University of Beirut are ivy covered. It's called the Harvard of the Middle East. It was left intact in the war. All around it are bullet-pocked buildings.

Midnight and it's sticky. Airless air. I'm alone on quiet streets. I feel safer than I would in most NY neighborhoods. Cats rule the streets, scare the crap out of me by darting out beneath my feet.

The leather-skinned grand dames at the pool are at least AS scary as the militia boys. I swim laps. Sprout freckles.

I'm a one-man film crew. I write the script in the morning and shoot a couple more interviews. I stumble onto some kids break dancing in front of a mosque and make an appointment to go back and shoot it tonight.

Ahmad Abu Hassan is 71 and has been driving a taxi in Beirut for 51 years. Through the wars. Through the fire fights. He's seen it all. He's done it all. He gives me a tour of the town. I roll on it and come up with an idea for a TV series involving cabbies of the world. The good ones know truths that the best think tankers could never postulate. Ahmad claims to know Peter Jennings. Irish writer Robert Fisk (who's book is banned in Lebanon) is a personal friend. He wants 75 bucks for the three hour tour of the town. We agree on half that. Tomorrow I'll go with him again. He's a kick.

A curiosity: The Jewish cemetary in the heart of Beirut has been left in tact. Not even any grafitti. Even during the war, with the Green Line only a hundred meters away, it was left untouched by both sides (which took turns killing Isrealis). They make a major distinction between Arab Jews of the Middle East and the European Jews of Isreal. I'm on my way to film the cemetary now.

My belly is sunburnt. No more backstroke in the pool.








































































Beirut by night is quiet and hot... back to the bourgesias (how do you spell that fancy word anyway?)



























Bill // 2:13 PM

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