Nicole Carpenter used to go through my city like a walking middle finger. She fought, smoked, dipped, drank and skipped school, and by the time she finally reached her junior year of high school, she altogether dropped out. I met her some years ago in my hometown of Battle Creek, the Cereal Capitol of the world (think: Kellogg’s Cornflakes).

Nicole wore sandy blond cornrows that dropped to her waist and wrapped around her like seaweed. She’d sway her head side to side and fling those braids behind her shoulders, rake back the strays with two acrylic nails, then light up a Newport 100. Nicole was exceptionally petite, about four-feet-nine inches, and could’ve passed for an eleven –year old.

When Nicole found out she was pregnant (at age seventeen), she moved out of her parents’, picked up a job at Arby’s, and moved in to the guy she thought (“I mean, shoot, he prolly is, that muthafucker…he the only one who didn’t wear a jimmy cap.”) might be the father of her baby.

Dad was Nicole’s doctor and had been since she was a little baby. He was in maybe his eighteenth year practicing as family physician, performing everything from wart removal to severing umbilical cords, when Nicole resurfaced, dangling her legs over a paper-wrapped table when he walked into the exam room. That was the same year Dad stopped delivering babies for good, and Nicole was one of the last patients he worked with in the delivery room.

Dad claims he was forced to stop delivering babies because the cost of malpractice insurance had got so high. Mom says she fast-forwarded the decision after Dad got paged in the middle of Midnight Mass for the tenth Christmas Eve in a row, but I think that Nicole, specifically Nicole’s pregnancy, had an affect on the verdict, too. The whole thing just seemed to deflate him.

Being a doctor in such a small town, my dad was a bit of a celebrity. Folks had named their dogs after him (different variations of Phil, Philip and Ptacin) and there wasn’t a time he could zip in and out of Felpaush Grocery without getting impeded by folks for minor medical attention, which can be particularly embarrassing when you’re with him and your hands are balancing items like Pepto-Bismol, toilet paper, Tampons, or anything that revealed to the world that you, too, go to the bathroom. But my dad would take his time with people, put his hand on the shoulder of the ailing individual, lean in as if to whisper a secret and say, “How can I help?” I guess that’s how I learned about patience—by watching him exhibit this untamed (or untainted) compassion. Dad had a Paul Bunyon-sized heart, and my friends claimed he was the Jesus reincarnate.

Mom said he was just a big baby. You be the judge: late one night back when he was a medical student at Georgetown, Dad got mugged while jogging through campus. My father had no cash or money on him, to his name really, but invited the thief back to his “minimalist” apartment anyway, for some fruit and to write him a check. Dad said that if the guy was going to don a black mask and attempt a mugging, he needed the hundred bucks more than he did.

Growing up, my family’s dinner conversations revolved around Dad’s work stories. With our chins resting on our hands and our elbows framing our dinner plates, we’d listen to him talk about our town, about our time and our people. I remember chewing on a square piece of pork tenderloin when he told us the tale about the obese man with maggots that laid eggs in his belly button, or the one about the surgeon who stitched up a guy after a vasectomy and forgot to remove the gauze.

One night (I was about eighteen or nineteen years old) when we were shooting the shit around the dinner table, Nicole’s name came up. My Polish mother said, “Phil, tell de girls about Nicole, you patient with dying baby.” She shook her head. “Dis is such tragedy!”

“Who’s Nicole?” I asked.

Dad put down his silverware and blew out a long trail of breath. “Oh, Nicole,” he said without looking up. “She’s one of my patients.”

“And is driving you Daddy down de wall,” Mom added.

“It’s ‘up the wall’,” my sister Sabina chimed.

“Nicole’s been coming to my office since she was a little baby,” he said, “but I hadn’t seen her in years until she came in for a prenatal exam.”

Mom interjected, “She thinks she Mary, Mother of God.”

Dad sighed again. “Nicole’s a bit dramatic.”

He told us that Nicole’s pregnancy was a rare and complicated. She was born with something called Russell-Silver Syndrome, a rare chromosomal abnormality that caused someone to be very small and look much younger than they were. When she came into my dad’s office for her first prenatal checkup, all fresh-faced and pregnant, Dad sent her to a specialist for extra testing to see if Russell-Silver Syndrome would affect her fetus at all. Results proved that it would not, but something else blipped up in the tests. Nicole’s baby had Anencephaly, a totally unrelated birth defect.

Dad took the paper napkin off his lap, unfolded it and laid it out over the kitchen table. “Anencephaly refers to the incomplete development of a fetus’s brain and spinal cord, and their protective coverings.” He pulled a pen out of his pocket, one with a built-in laser pointer and the word Celebrex written up the side, and began sketching onto the cleaner side of the napkin: a line, a loop, a crescent. “It occurs when the neural tube—a narrow sheath that is supposed to fold and close during the third or fourth week of pregnancy…”—the pen doubled back; a tulip, a pea pod, a tunnel—“fails to close, resulting in failure of major portions of the brain, and failure of the skull and scalp to form.”

I leaned in for a closer look at Dad’s drawing. It looked like a roller coaster. “No brain? No shit?” I asked and Sabina kicked me from under the table.

“Infants born with Anencephaly are usually blind, deaf, and unconscious.”

“And what is ze fate to the babies?” Mom asked.

“When Nicole’s baby would be born it would have already suffered serious brain damage…wouldn’t be able to eat, not even breathe for long.”

“Holy wow,” I said. “Do they suffer, Dad?”

My father put down the pen and handed me the napkin. I folded it up four times and slid it under my plate. “It’s not a painful condition,” he said, “but it is inevitably fatal.”

“Poor baby. Poor her soul. It is very sad,” Mom said, then joined Sabina, who was clearing the table. Dad pushed out his chair, and as he began to stand up I stopped him.

“Wait, what happened next? To the girl?” I asked.

“The specialist explained all this to Nicole and recommended that she terminate the pregnancy.”

“Then what?”

“Dad works at a Catholic hospital, Mira. They don’t do abortions,” Sabina said. She had recently denounced her Catholicism, claimed it was homophobic, sexist and past its prime. I envied that she got to sleep in during church.

“Nicole basically freaked out and drove straight back to my office.”

“Screaming and crying like child,” Mom called from the sink.

“Yes, screaming and crying and causing this huge commotion in the waiting room, demanding to see me.” He carried his plate to the sink. I followed him.

“So then I pulled her into an exam room and tried to calmed her down. Go get your dishes, please, Mira,” Dad said.

I went to the table and returned with my plate. “Then what? Then what did you say to her?”

“Well, we talked. I explained that it wasn’t her fault, that she didn’t cause this and couldn’t have prevented it. I just looked at her and said, ‘Nicole, there is just nothing you or me or anyone can do about this. There’s no surgery to do in the womb, no medicine you can take.’ I just told her, ‘Nicole, your baby just ain’t going to survive.’”

Dad dropped a big spoon into the coffee beans, leveled off a scoop of decaf and tipped it into the coffee maker. He walked over to Mom, who was loading bowls into the dishwasher, put his hands on her shoulders, kissed her forehead and gently pushed her out of the kitchen. He handed Sabina a towel, rolled up his sleeves and plunged a big pot into the kitchen sink.

“I told Nicole that she could transfer medical facilities if she’d prefer to abort the fetus.”

“So did she get, you know, what Beanie said?”

Sabina threw a towel at me and told me to make myself useful.

“She panicked and became frightened by the thought of an abortion,” Dad said. He folded his arms and leaned back onto the ivory refrigerator door, which was checkered with magnets of our old school photos and Mom’s kitchen wisdom quotes. One magnet framed an old family photo: our family wearing matching St. Philip Elementary School sweatshirts, rosy cheeks, huddled in a tripod. One magnet had a cartoon of two makizushi rolls on it. Wake up, little sushi, it read.

“I remember Nicole sitting on the exam table, weeping. She said to me ‘This was a spark that had no chance at life without my help, so if my child was meant to live for five minutes, it is going to live for five minutes.’”

There was a moment of silence, which was quickly interrupted by the buzzing and scraping sound of Mom sliding the electric broom across the tile floor.

“I agreed to ride it out with her,” Dad said in what sounded like a whisper, even over the vacuum.

“Tell the girls about the board, Phil,” Mom said, plowing the vacuum past us.

“What board? What happened?”

“So we continued giving Nicole care—a lot of care—during her pregnancy. She came into the office several times unannounced, saying she felt movement and thought she was having a miscarriage. We were there for her around the clock. But at the same time, the hospital was struggling with the technicalities of the delivery,” he said. “It was like this: the baby would die outside the womb, and in a purely medical sense whether Nicole delivered at twelve weeks or forty weeks, the question was moot. But because of the Silver Syndrome, because Nicole was such a tiny person, she wouldn’t be able to deliver a normal sized baby because it wouldn’t fit through the bones of her pelvis.”

“So what could she do? What were her choices?”

“She would have to have a Caesarian delivery, and for a woman of her size, this was dangerous procedure.” The vacuuming stopped.

“Daddy and Catholic bishop met during de week, during time we had dance class,” Mom said.

“We formed an Ethics Committee. The director of hospital, a lawyer, Al Skipper, the hospital chaplain, and other doctors to determine how early Nicole could be induced without it being considered a termination of—or an unnatural—pregnancy. We finally decided on a time, up to the very minute, of what was considered ‘natural.’”

“Yeah…God’s way,” Sabina sighed.

“So what happened?” I asked again.

“The baby inside Nicole grew. She felt it kicking.”

“What did she do?”

“She dug in her heels and carried the baby through the pregnancy. She learned the sex of the baby. She bought maternity clothes and pink baby clothes. She named the baby. Even the nurses at the hospital knitted booties and made a baby quilt. She hired Reverend Skipper from the Ethics Committee to facilitate the funeral of the baby.”

“And then?”

“And then we induced her when it was the right time.”

“And then?”

“And then Nicole delivered her baby, vaginally.”

“And then?”

“And then after five hours, the baby girl died in Nicole’s arms.”

“Poor her soul, indeed,” I agreed.

A few weeks later I met Nicole. I’m not sure why I did it, but I wanted to meet this person, this girl, this woman. I just had to get her story. It was as if she carried some kind of answer my younger self had been looking for. I found her in a booth at Home Spun Family Restaurant, and as I sat down across from her, a shudder of recognition passed between us. I ordered a coffee while she smoked feverishly.

“Do you wanna see a picture of my little girl?” she asked.

She slid the photo across the table, a 4 x 6 glossy with edges that were beginning to coil and curl towards the center, like a dried leaf. I continued to look at Nicole, afraid at what I might see.

“That’s my lil’ girl Elizabeth,” Nicole said, and I looked at the photo in front of me, which was upside down. Nicole leaned over and rotated it counter-clockwise with her left hand, the hand holding a cigarette, to face me.

The baby in the photo was dead. She was tiny, had a pink cap over her head and looked like an old man. Not much different than any newborn—closed eyes and a pink complexion—but this baby was dead, and I could tell.

Nicole pulled a frilly scrapbook out of her purse and narrated a few more photos: baby Elizabeth in a long white lace dress, Nicole’s parents embracing Nicole on the hospital bed, a cluster of smiling nurses, and a print of a tiny white casket.

“You should be proud of yourself,” I told her.

She said she was. She said, “I’m talkin’ to my parents again, and I may be movin’ back home. This was a blessin’ in disguise I guess.” And while she was talking and smoking, I was thinking to myself Yeah but how does someone move on? Moving on…isn’t that what your baby was doing? Isn’t it your job to try to remember?

A year after that, Nicole came back to my dad’s office to announce she had gotten pregnant again, and that she had given birth to a healthy baby. Mom thought it’d be nice to round up a roomful of baby goods—diapers, a stroller, a crib and a bunch of barely-used onesies from the Salvation Army—and throw Nicole a belated baby shower. She invited nurses, Al Skipper, Dad’s office manager, and some of her own friends (a couple of doctors’ wives who happened to be immigrants, too) to celebrate Nicole’s new life. See look, I thought, there is a reason for everything. God knows what he’s doing. He will always make you happy again. But when the day came and they were all in the waiting room, ready to shower Nicole with their streamers and white frosting baby cake, ten minutes passed, then twenty, then Nicole never showed up. Dad tried to call her and got a droning signal at the other end of the line, a recorded robot voice saying the phone number was no longer in service and had been disconnected. He checked the hospital records, which revealed she had had a baby boy, and that’s it.

With wet eyes, Mom re-donated all the baby goods back to the Salvation Army, took the stroller to Kids R Us and brought me along for the ride. In the car I tried to be the optimist and come up with excuses for Nicole’s absence, but it didn’t fly with her; she’s impenetrable to all types of sugarcoating. Maybe her baby got sick, I said. Mom ignored me. I’m sure Nicole is being a good mommy, Mom, really, she probably just had to work.

Give me break, Mom said. That girl was hussy and we both know it. She probably dump her baby wit de parents and is out tail chasing dis minute.

Mom, maybe she had amnesia, I said, and that’s when I started doubting my sense of the truth. I looked out the windshield of our family’s Chrysler minivan. I felt myself begin to warp into something I had been afraid of—a nihilist, a cynic, a misanthrope, the kind of person who deliberately tore small limbs off trees minding their own business, the kind of person who cursed under her breath rather than smile at someone passing by on the sidewalk, a person who added gray layers to their skin to make it thicker. Impenetrable. I looked up at the stupid face of Jeffrey the Giraffe towering over the doors to Toys R Us and I thought: What if that girl wasn’t the Buddha reincarnate after all? What if I was just not seeing the world for what it really was? Maybe she really wasn’t carrying that nugget of truth I needed so badly. Maybe she was just a girl from Cereal City, U.S.A., who worked at the Arby’s drive-thru on Capitol Avenue, and maybe I really was just a misanthrope after all. A misanthrope living with her parents.

BY ANNABEL SMITH

We arrive in the nameless village early, when the morning light is still thick and golden, marred only by the dark smudge of hills on the horizon. Doctors, nurses, dentists, support staff: a team of ten, we’ve flown into the Dominican Republic for a week of one-day stands. Day four, this is our fourth and final village. Like most foreigners, we’ve brought a sense of adventure and spare memory cards. Unlike them, we won’t be staying at luxury resorts or visiting golf courses. We have come to do good, to make a difference.

Our local partners are waiting for us in blue T-shirts like ours, clipboards ready. They’re clearly excited when our convoy arrives, and greet us with great enthusiasm. We climb off the bus and shake hands warmly. They show us the empty hall they’ve arranged for the doctors and a separate space for the dentists. The neat green community building is ideal, with several private rooms and a large main area filled with benches like pews. We unload the eight black suitcases and mysterious machines from the truck that follows us everywhere. The set-up team gets to work, while the rest of us wander off, knowing the drill, clutching our cameras.

The light is perfect, and I start taking pictures. At first glance everything seems so lush and vibrant that I want to roll around in the colour and soak it in. A wide river crosses the road further ahead and water channels run down the side of the streets. Most houses are wooden, a couple concrete, one or two a patchwork of metal. They’re painted seaside colours, pale pinks and turquoise, and the space beside each has been compressed and smoothed into a compound, some holding small flower gardens.

I walk on in search of new views. Despite so much water, the biscuit-coloured earth is completely parched: each truck and motorbike that roars past throws up a cloud of fine particles that settles back over everything. I pass a few struggling French marigolds and snapdragons and a long-abandoned hand pump. Further from the centre some of the houses are made of dirt. I put my camera away.

I find out later that this isn’t a village but a former banana batey, or company plantation. The big businesses have all gone now, taking the work with them, but leaving the workers behind. There are few jobs except growing enough food to eat. Some fields have been turned over to rice and sugar beet and there are still plenty of banana trees, but in many places all order has been lost and there is only a wild tangle of greens, broken by a few umbrella acacias and glossy mango trees. Villainous bougainvillaea conspires to make a subsistence existence look joyful.

Today is laundry day, and already sheets and shorts are flapping on strings stretched along the roadside. I pass women sitting on their heels in front of large plastic basins surrounded by small piles of clothes. Some smile and wave, many sit back resting as the clothes soak. Small children play in the dirt and sweet little piglets trot about.

The water has been brought from the river in yellow plastic cooking oil bottles; there doesn’t seem to be any soap. By the river I meet a man with a huge spotted sow on a string and I watch admiringly as she wades into the water and happily roots about. The pig is magnificent. The man grins with pride.

Everything is set up when I get back to the makeshift clinic. The doctors have taken over the three private rooms and are already with their first patients. The waiting room contains a scattering of women and children, and no men, which is what we have come to expect. The room will get busier and busier as word spreads through the community, but most men will stay away. A few may come for skin conditions like scabies and impetigo, or even reading glasses, but they will never mention the symptoms of the sexually transmitted infections that we know are widespread here. What good can we do if we only treat the women?

A secure space at the back of the hall has been set aside for the pharmacy, and it’s already buzzing with activity. The contents of the eight black suitcases are laid out on trestle tables: jauntily coloured cardboard boxes and packets; foil pouches; plastic bottles; blister strips. Every item has been donated, and although it looks higgledy-piggledy, each is in its place. Some bear the specialist labels of hospital supplies intended for professionals, others the eye-catching logos created for the supermarket. Some are familiar—Tylenol, Aleve, Advil—others unusual and difficult to identify.

I have no medical training and had expected simply to observe, but nobody just watches here, so I become part of the pharmacy team. When patients have seen one of the doctors they bring their prescriptions to us. We take them, find the right drugs, have them checked, then pass them to Juan, who sits outside the door, guarding the divide between waiting room and pharmacy.

It takes less than half an hour for me to learn how to fill a script on my own and I spend most of that time trying to decipher the doctors’ handwriting, which is universally atrocious. The patterns are very simple because there aren’t many choices. We try to keep the doctors up to date when we run out of drugs, but sometimes we fall behind. Then one of us has to go and face their frustration, which gets angrier as the day goes on. To compensate, we gossip about them, which is easy because they’re all young and good looking. I feel guilty about our laughter when I glance through the door.

Nobody speaks of cancer, TB or HIV. We have no surgical facilities and no specialists. We acknowledge only what we can treat that day.

Globally, nearly 5 million people with moderate to severe cancer pain get no appropriate pain medication. Nor do some one-and-a-half million with stage-four AIDS. Those in the global south are likely to have been diagnosed late and to have no hope. Severe pain means agony. Men, women and children suffer burns, accidents, gunshots, sickle-cell disease and the severe nerve damage that comes with diabetes with no pain relief at all. They may have been lucky enough to receive vaccines, antibiotics or anti-retrovirals, but without pain relief many prefer suicide.

Juan’s job is to explain the medication to the patients: how many tablets to take and when, and that these are not “caramellos.” A Venezuelan with two years of pre-med, Spanish is his first language. He is calm, colloquial and clear. The Dominican patients nod, smile and quietly ask questions. They are a little shy and deferential, but they seem to understand.

But many of the patients are Haitian, not Dominican, and Juan doesn’t speak Kreyol. None of us does. We can manage French between us, in an approximate sort of way, but for those with only Kreyol we carry out a pitiful show of mime and drawings. We have pictures of suns and moons and the empty faces of clocks onto which we draw the times at which the drugs are to be taken. When blank, confused faces look back at us, we know we have failed; at times it’s almost farcical. Juan tries, explaining everything once, then making each person repeat the instructions back to him, as best they can. It’s painstakingly slow, and by the end many of the Haitians simply look frightened.

During quiet moments in the pharmacy I stand watching Juan, looking over his shoulder to the waiting area beyond. Still almost every seat is taken by a woman or a child, their name stuck to them on white labels. Most women are pregnant and many are very young. They wear jeans or shorts and a T-shirt, their hair neatly braided, flip flops on their feet.

I find myself staring at a woman wearing a long white cotton summer dress with a deep handkerchief collar; her hair is short, unbraided and pulled back with a wide Alice-band. She reminds me of Bertha, Mr Rochester’s wife in Jane Eyre, for she, too, is clearly mad. She stares at the floor or looks at us childlike and uncomprehending. She is alone, and we can do nothing for her, yet I have an overwhelming desire to walk up to her and take her hand.

The children sit still and solemn on the benches: four little girls at the front, their braids fastened with pale blue bobbles. We work calmly and steadily, but they wait nearly three hours, their heads turning to follow a noise or sudden movement but otherwise their lives suspended. In awe of everything, they are wide-eyed and patient.

Doctors and nurses are constantly walking through the waiting area, sharing equipment, checking on drug availability, joking, laughing or stopping for a drink of water. Many pause to take photographs on their way. Nobody complains; it’s as if they know that part of the deal is that we have our trophies. Every single doctor and nurse finds a reason to walk past the tiny girl in the pale pink froth and the flowery headband, their cameras ready.

I take a break and wander out onto the dirt road towards the intersection that is downtown. The one small open-fronted shop has shelves stacked meticulously with drums of milk powder, bags of rice, cans of condensed milk and bottles and packets of all sorts of things. A huge scale hangs over the counter, where a few sad vegetables are wilting in the heat. The small pyramid of eggs nestled in the shade makes me think of the children I teach in the U.S. They are all well fed, and many are athletes. Most discard the yolks of their breakfast eggs, believing them to be unhealthy.

I walk back past the dentists, who have drawn a huge crowd. Dressed in blue scrubs and white masks they’re deeply absorbed in their work, bent low over their patients, surrounded by the large, strange machines. When I first walked past people were wary and standing well back. Now there’s a party atmosphere as they watch three dental students brandish a huge set of cardboard teeth and an enormous paper toothbrush. They’re showing everyone how to brush correctly: up into the corners and right to the back, then letting the children have a go. There’s much laughter and toothbrushes and toothpaste are handed out to everyone. Some people still look suspicious: a tall woman at the back has clearly been unnerved by the large photos of gum disease being wielded by another student, black teeth thrusting menacingly out of scarlet gums.

I’d forgotten about toothache. How extraordinary it must be to arrive in agony, unable to sleep or eat, and to leave with no pain. To have a rotten tooth extracted under anaesthetic; an abscess drained, a cavity filled, an infection treated with antibiotics. To feel pain switched off.

By midday the clinic is full. It’s hot and sticky in the pharmacy and we all make mistakes, muddling scripts, forgetting to double-check the age and weight of a child, mixing two drugs with similar names. Even when we get it right it feels hit and miss, or worse, hit and run. And what about me—I’m a schoolteacher. What on earth am I doing here?

The children in the clinic are all too small. It’s not only about malnutrition and lack of healthy food, although I wonder whether any child here has eaten five portions of fruit or vegetables in the last month, let alone in one day. It’s also about parasites. Most of these children get little benefit from the little food they eat because it feeds the worms that live inside them. Every child who comes through the clinic today gets two small tablets which they have to swallow in front of us with a glass of bright pink juice. Once their stomachs are their own again, then they will need protein, vitamins, minerals and carbohydrates to build their bodies enough that we can guess their ages. I think of the abandoned hand pump and the happily wading pig. There’s very little time before the next round of uninvited dinner guests arrives.

Everyone needs multivitamins, but our packets specially formulated for pregnant women run out almost at once. We substitute the brightly coloured animal-shaped children’s vitamins, but they are soon finished too. Americans spend $7 billion annually on vitamins and minerals, most of which they could do without. In a land of plenty, it shouldn’t be hard to let food be one’s medicine, as Hippocrates advised, and to send the vitamins to those who truly need them.

The island of Hispaniola is bisected by one of the world’s most dramatic borders, dividing relatively rich, hopeful Dominica from desperately poor, hopeless Haiti. But we are on the good side, where tourism has boomed and opportunities abound. Why, then, do these people have no healthcare or welfare?

During a quiet moment I ask our project director Bob why things are so bad here. He tells me that Haitian men have been crossing the island to work on the Dominican bateys for the last seventy years. During that time many started to stay between seasons and married immigrant Haitian women. The bateys became a unique mix of Haitian and Dominican people and cultures, but with one overriding characteristic: poverty. Because Haitians are non-citizens they are not seen as the government’s responsibility and so do not receive public services. In theory the private companies owning the bateys should provide for them; in practice, few do. Once the companies pull out, the communities are abandoned.

Almost all Haitians come originally from Togo. They have darker skin than most Dominicans, and those who live in the bateys are frequently discriminated against. They are seen as a drain on limited resources, and frequently blamed for the high rates of HIV and TB. They’re often treated with contempt and disgust.

By late afternoon it’s airless and stuffy in the pharmacy and we’re all yawning. The window slats are wide open and three little girls in blue and beige school uniforms have appeared, standing on tip-toes, waving through the blinds. We snack on Oreo cookies and chips to try to keep our energy up, and remind one another to drink plenty of bottled water.

Our drugs are running low. We’ve used nearly all the antibiotics and all the prescription-strength pain meds. We are becoming more generous with the Tylenol, though, giving several boxes to those who suffer from chronic pain. Why not? We’re going home tomorrow, and we need to get rid of them. They have no mystical value for us, we’re long
immune to the miracle of near instant pain relief.

American demands and expectations drove the market to provide tablets, caplets, chewy tabs and gelcaps, day strength, night strength and round-the-clock relief. We need never be in pain for more than ten minutes. In the community where I live and work in New England, pain medication is used largely to enhance athletic performance, so people can play sports longer and harder.

Is it possible to be too well?

At the end of the day, on the bus ride back to our hostel, I wonder what we achieved. We saw over 200 patients, almost all of whom will have benefited from our visit. We eased pain, cleared up infections, cured skin complaints and checked on pregnant women and babies. We taught basic health education and dental hygiene and helped women to look after themselves and their children. Above all, we showed up: we let people know we cared.

Yet I don’t feel like a hero, and I’m pretty sure none of my colleagues do either. Most are asleep, slumped uncomfortably, or gazing silently out of the windows. We all know that although we’ve helped many people, there are far more who have never seen a doctor. At best, we provided quick-fix philanthropy: a cocktail of Advil and good will. At worst we’ve been a distraction that allows boxes to be checked, consciences to be salved and the status quo to continue. What is really needed here is infrastructure: employment, education, covered drains, clean water, sewage disposal and a permanent clinic. We’d like to believe that this island and its people will one day have what they need, rather than just more jolly bougainvillea. We’d like to believe in one day.

BY CHRIS GRILLO

It must have been ‘89 because I was working at Blockbuster at the time. I remember the oppressive fluorescent lighting, the nauseatingly sweet scent of overly buttered popcorn and, of course, the hideous business casual uniforms—all of these flashbacks pummeled by the screeching tires and gunfire soundtrack of some action movie blaring out of the mounted TVs. Not sure what its hours are now but in 1989 this soul-sucking corporation stayed open until midnight 365 days a year, meaning the high school kids straightening shelves and vacuuming the drab commercial carpeting while the tills were tallied in the back office were let out at around 1am on school nights. We made a wallet-busting hourly wage of about four dollars and fifty cents. These were the pre-DVD days and there were rewinding machines behind the register for the person responsible for checking in the returned videos. (The “Please Be Kind and Rewind” stickers on the VHS tapes rarely inspired goodwill.) This unlucky person was also tasked with greeting customers as they entered the store, an onerous job for any self-loathing teenager wearing khakis and a blue oxford shirt. Allegedly there would be a cash reward for any greeter who said “hello” to the regional manager. This never happened as far as I could tell.

It was around that time that the Ramones were playing at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor. I thought it was an odd choice of venue—Sag Harbor being such a yuppie enclave out in the Hamptons—but I wasn’t going to pass up this opportunity to see one of my favorite all-time bands. My buddy Jeff and I were planning to drive out to Port Jefferson to Charlie’s house, where his family had moved after 8th grade, and then we’d head out to Sag Harbor from there. Rounding out our foursome was Vinnie, one of the few guys—including myself—on the staff of the Deer Park High School Year Book. None of us had seen the legendary Ramones before and this was a highly anticipated event.

On the night of the show, we arrived at Charlie’s house early in order to give us some time to find the place. We’d never been to Sag Harbor and again, this was 1989: no MapQuest or Google Earth. We spent some time catching up with Charlie’s parents and three younger brothers, marveled at the staggering number of Costco-sized cereal boxes in the kitchen pantry and took turns entertaining Thor, the family’s curious Collie. (While writing this piece, I emailed Jeff to verify parts of the story and he gleefully reminded me how, after returning to Charlie’s house after the show, I had to hide in the closet to escape Thor’s heat-seeking snout. “Thor was under the impression that you had rubbed steak sauce on your nether regions” was how he described the dog’s repeated attempts to burrow his elongated sniffer into my crotch.) After a half hour or so we were ready to head out. It was a winter evening and snow was starting to fall from the darkening sky. We piled into Charlie’s Monte Carlo and made our way east. We were amped, almost giddy, as we hurtled along the dark and mostly deserted Long Island Expressway, the Ramones and other punk and metal favorites blasting out of the speakers at an unholy volume. Not only were we about to finally see the Ramones—the progenitors of punk and celebrated homegrown heroes—but we had folded an unpredictable adventure into the story. We were on our own, lured as much by the independent punk rock spirit of the occasion as by the magic of the band itself.

Of course we got lost. We had seen signs announcing that we had entered the town of Sag Harbor but we couldn’t find the venue. We pulled over and turned down the music. Huge wet snowflakes piled onto the windshield and were swept aside by the wipers. Damp arcs of precipitation blurred our view of the soggy street that lay ahead, illuminated by the headlights. Someone suggested we turn around so Charlie gave a quick glance over his shoulder, pulled a U-turn over the double yellow line and began driving in the other direction. We were pulled over promptly. There was a collective groan followed by a chorus of saltier expressions cursing our rotten luck. We feared we’d never get to the show in time. A few minutes after a surprisingly lenient warning and some hastily delivered directions, however, and we were turning into the parking lot of the Bay Street Theater. We were finally going to see the Ramones! As we drove slowly past the club—tires crunching over packed snow—we couldn’t help but notice that the people in line were not only ten years older, but also neatly dressed in slacks and buttoned-down shirts, the women wearing skirts and clutching glittery purses. The most ominous problem was the pair of gargantuan bouncers checking IDs at the door. Was this the right place? I rolled down my window.

“Excuse me,” I shouted through the snow to a guy near the end of the line. I could have sworn he was he wearing khakis and a blue oxford shirt. “Is this the Ramones show?”

He shrugged and turned around. I rolled up the window. “Dick.”

“Well, we might as well check it out,” Jeff said. “We drove all the way out here.”

Of course he was right but we all quietly dreaded getting out of the car in our torn jeans and Misfits T-shirts only to be turned away by the thick-necked goon squad guarding the door. Our punk-fueled enthusiasm was quickly waning. We waited in line without saying a word for what seemed like an hour. The way I saw it, Jeff and Charlie would probably get in, but Vinnie and I were doomed. Jeff had always been able to grow facial hair and he sported a healthy mustache that night. Charlie, although not as hirsute, possessed a burlier build than the rest of us and was months away from joining the Marines. Vinnie could have easily passed for 13. He was short and scrawny, his Ramones tee stretching well below the hem of his denim jacket and nearly blousing around his knees. As for me, I was often mistaken for someone much younger. An emergency room nurse once told me I needed parental consent before I could have my chin stitched after a college soccer game. “How old do you think I am?” I asked, incredulous, blood gushing down my shirt front. “Twelve, thirteen,” was her humorless reply. I was 21 at the time.

Standing and shivering outside the club, I was already contemplating a cold, miserable night in the car. What would sting even more would be the injustice of it all, the fact that the genuine punks—the ones who had driven 50 miles in the snow to see one of their favorite bands—would be turned away in front of the smug smirks of an indifferent older crowd just looking for a fun night out. I suddenly felt even more out of place. Whenever I picked my head up to look around, it seemed as if contemptuous glances were cast in our direction. It may have been me-against-the-world teenaged paranoia, but the message conveyed in those disapproving stares seemed to be: “What the hell are these derelict kids doing in Sag Harbor?” At least that’s how I translated what appeared to be a thinly disguised disdain for youth, for blue-collar rebellion, and for punk music.

I have to admit, part of me relished this outsider status as it seemed to blend into the punk rock mindset quite seamlessly. I was young and idealistic, my own disdain for consumerism and untrustworthy government emboldened by the “fuck the world” anti-establishment ethos of the punk music I loved. I wrote lyrics from Fugazi songs on my white T-shirts. I grew my hair long. I drank. Yet I still played for the high school soccer team and joined the year book staff. Not exactly outsider qualifications.

Looking back now, I wonder what happened to that person, the passionate, heart-on-his-sleeve young man who naively thought that making bold statements and being a vegetarian could inspire or even actualize change, however small. Have I become complacent in my middle years? Perhaps a bit too cynical or jaded? Sometimes I think the younger, more idealistic version of me still exists—he’s just inundated with the everyday pressures and rigors of adulthood, the sleeplessness and stress of parenthood, and the daunting realization that that nefarious corporate paycheck is actually very much a necessity to help pay for little things like a mortgage, food and daycare. There’s just never enough time or energy for idealism.

“I just hope we can get in the fucking door,” I remember thinking as I stood shivering in my T-shirt.

Suddenly, a glimmer of hope was revealed as we approached the front of the line. The familiar suffocated thump of loud music could be heard through the walls of the club, the volume amplified every time someone opened the door. Now we only needed to find a way to get in. As luck would have it, this potential roadblock was also overblown. The goons gave our IDs cursory glances and quickly ushered us inside. Was it an all-ages show? Doubtful. Was it too cold for them to care? Perhaps. I’d like to think that nothing could have stopped us on that night, that our desire and determination to experience our first Ramones show would not be denied. Nevertheless, we hustled inside, exchanging furtive smiles, and felt the warmth of the crowded room start to thaw our frigid limbs. I saw a poster announcing the Ramones show and pointed; Jeff and I looked at each other with relief. The bored girl in the ticket booth collected our money with perfected disinterest, not bothering to ask whether we wanted to check our coats. There were more business casual types inside, milling around the bar and chatting up the women. Were we really the outsiders? We’d been to dozens of shows before and we’d never witnessed a crowd that seemed so out of place.

Jeff excitedly tapped me on the shoulder. “GBH!” he exclaimed in reference to the rambunctious, punk metal song the DJ was playing, a track from the “City Baby Attacked by Rats” record from the early ‘80s—not that the gold chain and Drakar Noir-wearing philistines populating this pretentious shithole would know the difference.

The Ramones eventually took the stage in their trademark torn blue jeans and black leather jackets. They ripped through a blistering set of their best songs, an unrelenting maelstrom of up-tempo guitars and pounding drums punctuated by a guttural “1, 2, 3, 4!” before launching into the next assault. It was pure, unabashed rock-n-roll cut down to the bare essentials, a 4-chord nirvana doled out in a barrage of two-minute punk songs. We were ecstatic, jumping around the crowded dance floor and soaking it up. What made the show even more meaningful was the fact that the bassist, CJ Ramone, hailed from our hometown of Deer Park. He was a Ramone and he was one of us!

I’m not sure exactly when I realized it—perhaps during “Teenage Lobotomy” or “Beat on the Brat” or “Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment”—but it suddenly became quite clear that while we were blissfully bopping our scrawny high school bodies around the club, singing along with their inanely wonderful lyrics (“I don’t want to be a pinhead no more! I just met a girl that I could go for!”), a more sinister element had begun to emerge in the audience. Apparently the older crowd had knocked a few back by this point and was starting to get riled up—you might even say borderline violent. Vinnie, who was standing just to my right, got body blocked into the wall of people in front of us and crumpled to the ground. I spun around to see some ape with his shirt unbuttoned high-fiving his friends and then bounding off in another direction. What the fuck? I helped Vinnie up. He assured me he was OK and we quickly moved off to the side.

“What is wrong with these assholes?” I thought to myself as they maliciously lined people up and barreled over them. Jeff, Charlie and I had been to numerous shows together and although we were metal heads, longhairs, and didn’t exactly fit in with the New York hardcore scene, we were very familiar with the code: You helped anyone up if they fell down. If they had to re-tie their laces, you watched their back so they didn’t get inadvertently stomped by the surging crowd. I once carried an unconscious kid out of the pit during a Murphy’s Law show after he had jumped off the stage and banged his head on the ground. We prided ourselves on being old school (even though we were only teenagers) and we knew that you weren’t supposed to blatantly blindside an unsuspecting person. This was clearly not CBGB’s or Max’s Kansas City, not that we had ever been to those places (I’d go to CBGB’s many times later on but Max’s sadly closed before my time), but this was my first Ramones show and I was going to make the best of it.

Again, the set list is now a blur, but at one point Charlie boosted me up and I surfed the crowd for a minute or so, a thrilling yet foolish maneuver that resulted in my crashing to the floor of the narrow space behind the partition dividing the crowd from the stage. I quickly leaped on stage and found myself face to face with Joey Ramone. I was literally inches from his mic stand and couldn’t help but notice, as security swooped in and dragged me off by the back of my shirt, that Joey had a thick stream of what appeared to be blood and snot oozing out of his nose and down his chin. What stands out the most from this brief encounter is that while part of my brain was occupied by the task at hand (I was being forcefully removed from the stage), another part was focused on the entranced expression on Joey’s face—the eerie, fixated stare from behind his round, tinted glasses and the fact that he didn’t even bother to wipe the bloody phlegm from his chin. Was he so locked into the music that he didn’t even notice? Or was he just high, drifting his way through the set list in a world of his own?

Of course we’ll never know. But while a bloodied and spellbound Joey and the rest of the Ramones steadfastly blazed through their set just as they had done thousands of times before, I was mercifully thrown off the side of the stage and permitted to rejoin the sweaty throng of revelers, a combination of glee and trepidation in my heart. I would go on to see the Ramones at least a dozen times, but this show was my first. It may not have been CBGB’s but I was with my friends and, for a few short hours, we were finally living our punk rock dream.

A few days later—the ringing in my ears having finally subsided—I was standing at the register at Blockbuster, which was comprised of a till and a PC monitor that listed all of the customer’s account information. It was late and I was tired. I absentmindedly took the next customer’s card and scanned it, only this name on the screen was instantly familiar: Ward, Christopher. I looked up and standing before me was none other than CJ fucking Ramone! A sleeveless shirt exposed his tattoo-covered arms, and over his shoulder was slung the same black leather jacket from the show. He was with an attractive girl with lots of earrings, torn stockings and purple streaks in her hair. I told him how much I enjoyed the show. He told me he was having the time of his life. I was awe struck, not only by who he was but also by the sheer improbability of his being in my store during my shift just a couple days after seeing him perform. And he was so cool. Despite his recently acquired status as punk rock royalty, he comported himself with the humility and diffidence of a local kid lucky enough to be living his own dream. His newfound fame clearly hadn’t gone to his head and this fact really resonated with me. I felt as if I could relate to him, like he really was one of us after all. Of course I didn’t charge him for the videos. Blockbuster and its bullshit uniforms could kiss my ass.

This piece was written just before the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America on January 20, 2009.

Has Change Really Come?

Thousands crowd around transistor radios in Nairobi and all around Africa from Goma to Mogadishu. Far away in Chicago, a once upon a time “skinny kid with a funny name” stands before an ecstatic crowd. “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible,” he begins, “who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.” That man, that black man, is Barack Obama. And in that moment, as he speaks and America applauds, as his image and words are beamed to the world from one satellite to the next, across cellular networks and along fiber-optic cables, that son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas is American Zeitgeist personified. We cannot see it in his demeanor but we can hear it in his words: “It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.”

But has change really come?

History is being made in America, yet even as a black man fulfills Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream by being judged by the content of his character and not the color of his skin, on the same day, out in California, Arizona and Florida, the wee gains earned by another estranged minority demographic are being rolled back. On this day of momentous change in America that puts a black man on his way to the White House, the right of same-sex couples to live in legal matrimony is denied.

And what more can one expect in the electoral system of democracy where the onus is placed upon millions of individuals to say “yes” or “no” to the existential questions of life and liberty? To choose either Republican or Democrat where the devil they know is somewhere in between? When one man comes and appeals to people of all races and creeds across the pre-set boundaries of Red and Blue, what he gains is the burden of their divergent expectations.

As Obama’s presidency turns from dream into reality, so must these mounting expectations face the cold shoulder of reality. America must realize that Obama’s win is not a revolution. It is an evolution of the American democratic process. It is an evolution to a point of perfecting the political sleight of hand that all democracies aim for: the endorsement by the people of the maintenance of the status quo, or a simulacrum of it, that the power elite can live with. That realization must begin in America and travel the entire globe right down to Obama’s fatherland—my country Kenya.

Who is Obama?

Just like the rest of us mortal, non-American-President-Elects, there are a lot of things that Obama is or is not. What we do not know we can only speculate, but to keep that speculation within reason is to ask too much from most Obama watchers. Some have posited that since Obama is not a descendant of slaves, he does not have the deep seated resentment for white people that is said to characterize most Americans of African descent. But wait a minute, says Ben Macintyre writing for The Times of London, (1) “Barack Obama is no admirer of British colonialism, to judge from his writings, but the discovery that the British authorities tortured his grandfather may well deepen any animosity.”

Obama’s Kenyan grandfather was tortured by the Brits at the height of Kenya’s independence struggle. This story was quickly picked up by all the major papers in the UK and even got a helping hand across the pond by The Huffington Post. (2) I fail to see how his (alongside that of several UK Labour Party MPs in the ’50s) not being a fan of British colonialism makes him a danger to British-American partnership.

That said, Obama is in fact quite distanced from the realities of Kenyan colonial history. Obama did not grow up in a Kenya conflicted by the neocolonialist historical revisionism in school and the whispers of the savage brutality of the white man at home. And if it is true that Obama’s grandfather was arrested, jailed, and tortured for two years, it does not make Obama, by default, a radical.

What is particularly spurious in Macintyre’s article are his attempts to connect Obama’s grandfather to the violence of Mau Mau. The Mau Mau revolt lasted between 1952 and 1960. And even considering Britain’s reaction to it, which was the detention without trial of tens of thousands of Kikuyus and the villagisation of the rest of them, Mau Mau was a Kikuyu problem. If Obama’s grandfather had come from fighting on the British side in the second World War, that he was jailed in 1949 does not mean that he was a member of Mau Mau but of at least one of a host of outlawed organizations. That organization could have been the Kikuyu Central Association (and Macintyre’s article agrees with this), even though he was a Luo, or even a trade union. Such movements were outlawed not because they were violent, Marxist or evil in anyway anyone can think of in modern Britain but because they sought a decent level of African representation in government. The violence would come later, long after Obama’s grandfather had been released from jail, and as Obama points out in his memoirs he was jailed for over six months and later found innocent. Obama does not dwell on it, who are we to?

To accuse Barack Hussein Obama of a genetic predisposition to militarism is, and I say this tongue in cheek, to confuse him with Thomas Baptiste Morello. That is the Kenyan-American who rages against every and any machine of power including Obama. Rocker par excellence and guitarist for Rage Against the Machine, Morello is an ethnic Kikuyu. Yes, he is from Illinois, half Kenyan, half, ahem, Irish American, too. He is in his forties, and though, unlike Obama he hasn’t won two Grammies, he has gone platinum twice. And while Obama’s links to Mau Mau and revolutionaries are rather tenuous, Morello’s father—Ngethe Njoroge, Kenya’s first ambassador to the United Nations—was a once upon a time Mau Mau guerilla, and Morello himself has funded Mexico’s Zapatista rebels.

Obama’s only claim to social change fame is his brief stint as a community organizer in Chicago which was a stepping stone to an illustrious career in electoral politics. But today, Obama is no longer a community organizer nor is he some left leaning university professor, a token black face in the dinning rooms of Bill Ayers and other radical chic whites, he is the President of the United States of America. He is not seeking to engage the system, he is the system. The buck will now stop with him. His job is to protect America’s capitalistic imperialism and the most we can ask of him is that he wears a face not as brutal as Britannia’s.

The Only Thing We Have to Fear?

If Obama is in the least given to ethnic prejudices, then the only person who would have anything to fear in Obama’s foreign policy decisions is President Mwai Kibaki of Kenya. Or so the casual Kenyan observer blinded by the pettiness of our ethnic politics would think.

In late December 2007, Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner of a second presidential term after disputed elections. Immediately after this announcement, the country erupted in the most vicious sectarian violence of its post-independence history. To grossly simplify it, the violence pitted members of Kibaki’s Kikuyu tribe against all the other tribes and particularly the Luo tribe of his arch rival in that election, Raila Odinga. The blood-letting lasted through January and most of February until a power sharing deal, brokered by former UN Secretary General Kofi Anan, was signed on February 28, 2008. Scattered skirmishes continued to erupt around the country until Raila Odinga was sworn in as Prime Minister, and de facto second in command to President Mwai Kibaki. It was the arrival of the tough talking Condoleeza Rice into Kenya with a message from George Bush (5) that pushed the hand of the two principles towards a power sharing deal.

What If?

Would America’s reaction have been any different under an Obama presidency? With an ethnic Luo president of the United States of America? Hardly.

To begin with, Obama is a strong critic of Kibaki and the only statement that he has made that could be construed as being likely to guide his policy towards Kenya is that corruption must end in this country.

But assuming we are to join the long line of Obama detractors and argue that his policy towards Kenya will be informed by parochial and kindred interests, then Kibaki, though a Kikuyu, has nothing to fear. Kibaki and Obama Sr. were friends. Even more than that, Kibaki got Obama Sr. a job as an economist at the Kenyan Treasury. Obama Sr. had been fired from his earlier job as a government economist and alienated from government for his anti-government protests in the wake of his benefactor Tom Mboya’s assassination. (The scholarship that landed Obama Sr. in America and the University of Hawaii, where he met Mary Anne Dunham, future mother of President Obama, was one of many organized by Tom Mboya). This return to political favor, though, would take place after the death of Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, and with Mwai Kibaki’s rise to the position of Vice President and Minister of Finance.

What about Raila Odinga, who is from Obama’s Luo community? To openly support Raila in a political contest with Kibaki would be political suicide for Obama. All of America’s far Right would run roughshod over Obama yelling “Communist!” In 1965, as Obama Sr. was finishing his Masters in Economics at Harvard, Raila Odinga was on his way to the Technical University, Magdeburg in East Germany. In the height of the Post Election Violence (casually referred to as P.E.V. these days) in Kenya, many of Obama’s American detractors tried to connect him to Raila Odinga with some going as far as to suggest that Obama morally and financially supported the Raila Odinga presidential campaign. All this was not helped by Raila Odinga having told the BBC last January that he is Obama’s cousin, (6) even though that assertion has been denied by the larger Obama family. This is all eerily ridiculous, a guilt by association where the associations are nothing more than tenuous and easy to brush aside-until, that is, the accusations begin to be doled out of the hands of right wing bloggers, Jerome Corsi, and Fox News.

But that is working on the assumption that Obama’s policy decision towards Kenya will be at all informed by his personal relationships. What does Obama himself say? In an interview that appeared in The Daily Nation, in Kenya, of September 1, 2006, Obama says:

It’s educating people on the issue. There is the perception that if there’s ethnic politics the big man in the tribe is going to take care of you. But if you look at what actually happens, only a handful of people in your ethnic group are taken care of. The rest of the people, they are in the 56 per cent of the country living below the poverty line. So why commit yourself to that kind of politics? Why not look at the agenda and platform and find out what they will do for the 56 per cent who need help the most, who are committed to an anti-corruption agenda, who are moving to try [to] improve the judiciary and the police and criminal justice system? If the focus is on issues and not the ethnicity, not the personality, then you can actually hold people accountable for following through on their promises. That’s got to come, again, from the bottom up, although what we do need is the leadership willing to fulfill that role and give voice to it. Part of the reason I went to give that speech at the university is the hope that the next generation is not tied too strongly to these old perceptions.

Consider: a road accident, early December of 2008. (4) Two cars—a BMW and a Mercedes Benz—race each other down Valley Road, Nairobi. (This is happening in a country where the annual Gross Per Capita Income is less than 700 US Dollars and close to half of the population is considered to live in abject poverty.) The occupants of the two cars are a couple of young Kenyan men heading from one bar to the next. It is 3 a.m. on a school night.

Who are the participants in this drama? In the Mercedes Benz: Raila Junior. In the BMW: Pepe Kamau. To the rescue: Joseph Muhoho. Raila Junior, a Luo, is the son of Prime Minister Raila Odinga. Pepe Kamau, a Kikuyu, is the son of recently retired chief of Kenya’s Criminal Investigation Department. And Joseph Muhoho is the son of the Director of Kenya’s Civil Aviation Authority, who also happens to be the brother of Mama Ngina Kenyatta, Kenya’s first First Lady and mother to Uhuru Kenyatta the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Trade. (Since the time this piece was written, Uhuru Kenyatta has become the Minister of Finance.)

And there you have it. Kenya’s national cake is not shared along tribal boundaries but class ones. If Obama were drawn into supporting one or the other—Odinga or Kibaki—Kenya’s economic dynamics would not change. Rich Kikuyus and rich Luos would still only get richer while poor Kikuyus and poor Luos become poorer.

Consider: if Obama had been a Kenyan, he would not have grown up as part of this power elite. He would have been his father’s son, (7)and one of the hordes living on the proverbial “less than a dollar a day.” If Obama must remember Kenya, it is only because it makes him proud to be an American. He is what he is today not because of his Kenyan roots, but in spite of them. Obama’s success has nothing to do with Kenya and everything to do with America.

Will Change Come to Kenya?

On the day of Obama’s inauguration, Americans can stand up and cheer, and salute one moment when the words of the founding fathers of their nation ring true: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” On January 20th, Americans will celebrate, and Kenyans will join them.

But the only real change that Kenyans have seen lately is grim. For in my country, the cost of living is always on the rise, the chance of living on the downfall, and what passes for liberty—through our own sham of democracy—is the perennial pastime of recycling political thugs. Shouldn’t we Kenyans, then, leave the Americans to fête their own, and if we must honor Obama, do so by instituting change that we can call our own, change that a significant majority of Kenyans can not only believe in but live by?

LINKS
1. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article5276010.ece
2. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/03/obamas-grandfather-impris_n_1480
39.html
3. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/3543882/Barack-Obamas-grandfather-tortured-by-British.html
4. http://allafrica.com/stories/200812050668.html
5. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/world/africa/01diplo.html?_r=1
6. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7176683.stm
7. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/2590614/Barack-Obamas-lost-brother-found-in-Kenya.html

Her skin tells the truth: full, curvesome, with hints of over-ripeness, and yet glorious, glorious. My own skin, alert as a prairie dog.

Those were my salad days, the days of my early summer, they were the days of her early autumn. And it was winter that January, cold, brutal, my first in the realm, tempering the jubilation of an unrepentant ex-acolyte who, by moving to faithless Manhattan, had strained, if not broken, the thick leash of church and home. I needed sex as an aperient, to expunge still powerful strictures from my system. I needed symphonies of carnal love to flesh out the music my body had long been hearing, needed to feast on a buffet of bodies offered willingly, needed to pursue more earthly kingdoms.

She had sensed this at my older brother’s party—my brother, who regaled me with tales of New York on his occasional visits to Manila—sensed the night’s augury, when my eyes gloried in the sight of her décolletage. She picked up on my overwhelming lack of artfulness (praise be to naivete! I recalled thinking later on), sensed that I would be putty (though perhaps not as soft) in her hands.

I thought I was picking her up. Nothing could be further from the truth, but truth to tell, this hound didn’t care.

At her apartment, she said she had been widowed early, and had refused all offers of marriage since. Said she had seen the future and it was to be unrestricted by commitment and ceremony. Said her name was Cleo. No kidding, I remarked. No kidding. Then, I said, I will be your Anthony. She kissed me lingeringly.

“I hope your asp stings.”

Stroke of belly, down.

“Asp and you shall receive.”

And so she did, I did. We did, did, happy as oysters and brisk as rabbits robed in rain. In a marine feast of clam and abalone, seaweed, kelp, we were divers after pearls, weavers of bolts of silk. Alchemists of elixirs made to be swallowed, to transform us into devils and angels, into explorers of the body’s compass, our tongues to be tickled and pickled. And in her bedroom’s opposing mirrors, with their superfoetations, of image upon image, an infinite menagerie, of calves, asses, barnyard fowl (dark and crowing), atavistic, feline (clawed and clawing). I: Young man happily lost at she. She: Cleo, laved by a churning sea. Regal. Found her subject, her scepter, and ruled.

It proved to be a warm queendom, after all, Manhattan, and I, a cub in winter.

Part of a series of New York stories
Copyright Luis H. Francia

It’s just after rush hour on a warm July morning and I’m picking up my mother at Grace’s place in Bridgeport. I have to work at five-thirty in Manhattan and I’m praying that the traffic will behave and I will be able to take my mother to the dental clinic at Norwalk Hospital, bring her back to Bridgeport and make it back to the city on time. I drove to my father’s place in Connecticut after work the night before because I am panicked that I’ll miss the appointment, and it makes more sense to drive to Connecticut from Manhattan after work rather than driving home from work in Manhattan to Brooklyn and then leaving in the morning. Even though I have called my mother a few times to remind her that we are going to the dentist I know that she will not remember. I park in front of Grace’s building and buzz her apartment.

“Hi, Grace, it’s Erica.” No response.

“I’m downstairs.”

“Okay, we’ll be down.”

Grace says that they’ll be right down. That means at least ten minutes. My mother is on Alzheimer’s time and Grace is on Jamaican time which may account for why Grace is so well suited to care for my mother. I’m sure that as Grace is readying my mother she’s telling my mother that I’m downstairs waiting. Grace is probably repeating this several times as my mother repeatedly asks her where she’s going. Despite all this preparation when the elevator door opens and my mother sees me standing there, her face lights up.

“Sweetie, what a surprise,” my mother exclaims and she hugs me, “I miss you.” My mother always missed me, even when she was well and saw me frequently.

“I miss you too,” I say. “Hi Grace.”

Grace grunts. Grace’s not fond of saying hello or goodbye.

“What do you want to do, Sweetie?”

“I’m taking you to the dentist.”

“The dentist? I don’t need a dentist.”

“Yeah, you do.”

“I do? Why?”

“Because you’re teeth are cracked.”

“They are?”

“Yes, they are.”

“I don’t need a dentist to fix my teeth.”

“Then who? I don’t think you want me or Grace to fix your teeth, do you?”

“Why do I have to have my teeth fixed at all?”

“Because they’re broken. The dentist is going to give you new teeth?”

“What’s wrong with my old ones?”

“Open your mouth.”

My mother opens her mouth and I guide her finger inside, running it over the cracked nubs.

“Do you feel how they’re broken?”

“How did my teeth break?”

“It’s complicated. Today is just a check up. We’ll go to lunch after.”

“Or we could just go to lunch and skip the dentist.”

“We could, except that this appointment is years overdue. Ready? Say goodbye to Grace.”

“Isn’t she coming?”

“No she can’t, she has a lot of her own stuff to do. You’ll see her later.”

“Ohhh, don’t you want to come with us, Grace?”

“It’s okay, monmy,” Grace says in her Jamaican accent.

“Why can’t you come with us?”

“It’s okay. I’ll see you later,” Grace says.

“You will?”

“Yes, mommy, you go with Erica now. I’ll see you later.”

My mother kisses Grace, and Grace says “Bye mommy, I love you,” and my mother says, “I love you too, Grace,” and for a moment even though I know how lucky we are that my mother feels so comfortable with Grace, I am jealous. I also know that later when I bring my mother back she will ask why she can’t stay with me and that will upset me too.

I ease my mother into the passenger seat of her Toyota ’87 Corolla, placing my hand over her head so she doesn’t bump it as she’s getting in, and I fasten the seatbelt.

“This is my car,” my mother announces, “a Toyota ’87 Corolla.”

“That’s right, it is.”

“Why do you have my car?”

“So that I can see you more often and take you places.”

“Oh. This is my car, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But you don’t drive it anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s easier for you to be driven than to drive. I’m your chauffeur. Isn’t it swanky, having a chauffeur?”

“Swanky.”

Once we are on the highway my mother sees another small white sedan.

“Look, there’s my car.”

“It looks like your car, but we’re actually in your car, so that can’t be your car.”

“So that’s not my car?”

“No. We’re in your car.”

A little bit down the road, another small white sedan passes us.

“There’s my car,” my mother says.

“I know, there are a lot of cars that look like your car.” I’m wondering how many little white sedans we’re gong to pass in this twenty minute ride. Next time I do this I should put a PBA out for all little white four-door sedans to stay home. Please.

On the highway my mother looks around and asks where we are and remarks that nothing looks familiar. I explain to her that that is because we are on the highway. But in fact everything does look the same and so much of the charm of the area has given way to huge shopping centers with huge stores repeating themselves endlessly from town to town, ugly large scale Andy Warhol’s in taupe and tan.

We pass Exit 17 and my mother says, “Exit 17…”

“Yes…”

“That’s Westport.”

“That’s right. Exit 17 is Westport.”

“I live there.”

“You used to live there.”

“I don’t anymore?”

“No, you don’t. Now you live with Grace.”

“I live with Grace? Where does Grace live?”

“Grace lives in Bridgeport and you live with Grace in Bridgeport.”

“I live in Bridgeport?”

“Yes. You live with Grace in Bridgeport.”

“I live in Bridgeport? How did that happen?”

“Well, we didn’t like you living alone anymore and so for a little while you lived with me in Brooklyn, and then you lived with Susan in Fairfield, and then you lived with Paula at Dad’s in Norwalk, and now you live with Grace and Albee in Bridgeport.”

My mother hasn’t adjusted to all the moving she has done since we realized that she could not live alone

“That’s a lot of bouncing around.”

“I know. I’m sorry…”

“I sound like a bum.”

“You’re not a bum. You’re very popular. We just all want you to live with us. You’re more like a hippy.”

“A hippy? I don’t want to be a hippy. Where are we going?”

“We’re going to the dentist.”

“The dentist? I don’t want to go to the dentist.”

“No one wants to go to the dentist. If you wanted to go to the dentist I would think that there was really something wrong with you. Like, maybe you were having an affair with the dentist. Are you having an affair with the dentist?”

“An affair with the dentist? Who would have an affair with a dentist?”

“I guess somebody might.”

“It doesn’t sound very appealing.”

When we arrive at Norwalk Hospital where the dental clinic is we hold hands as we walk down the corridors. My mother smiles at everyone she passes, and everyone smiles back. The dental clinic has a check-in window in the middle of a long corridor and after we give the receptionist our name and my mother’s social security card we are told to take a seat. We settle into our chairs. My mother stares off into space, and I pull out a book and just as I crack its spine,

“Oh my God, Erica, look at that man,” my mother points to a Mexican man signing in, “He’s so fat.”

“Mom!”

“What?”

“That’s not very nice.”

“Look at him.”

“Here, why don’t you look at a magazine?” It must be awful to have been a fat child and to have endured all that cruel teasing by other children, and then to have grown up and all the childish teasing and taunting ends only to be replaced by four million elderly people with impaired editing mechanisms. I go through the magazine selection on the table, and discover that I am actually challenged to find a magazine more interesting to look at than the fat man. They’re all home magazines, but not good ones. There’s a lot of ad copy and some uninspiring photos. My mother can’t really read anymore, so pictures are usually the way to go. I give her one of the magazines and for a little while, almost a minute, she flips through the pages as though she is actually skimming articles and ads the way a person without Alzheimer’s does. The difference is that she lingers, not on essays or pictures, but on insignificant words in an ad for encyclopedias or a subscription re-newel form, or the one blank spot on the page.

And while my mother stares down each page of the magazine, the last image I have of my friend Wayne pops into my head. Wayne was the owner of a restaurant I worked at in Brooklyn. His boyfriend was the chef and the co-owner and basically ran the place. We all wondered what Wayne did. He hosted and had a few design clients whom he would shop for. Mainly he saw a lot of art exhibits and movies and would come into the restaurant he had designed and sort of brighten the place with flowers and chit chat. He loved everyone who worked there and took a real interest in our lives, and believed in our talents, even if he had never seen us perform, and he understood us in some deep psychological way, like my mother. He also knew everything about the customers. One night he was training a hostess and we overheard him say, “Basically your job is to pollinate the tables. You want everyone to know each other by the end of the evening. That would be an ideal night.” We called it DTW, doing the Wayne. He was just like my mother. They were like Blanche duBois with the indiscretions and histrionics sliced out so that just the poetry remained. And they both had that laugh that culminated in chocking and spitting when they were really amused or naughty.

So Wayne’s at St.Vincent’s Hospital in the city and he is dying of AIDS and I have gone to visit him with my new boyfriend, Jack, an environmental lawyer who is 6’5″ and soft spoken. Jack notices that Wayne is sinking into the bed and that he is too weak to prop himself up.

“Wayne, would you like me to pull you up a bit, on the pillows? I think maybe you could see everyone a bit better that way,” Jack says.

“Oh, that would be lovely,” Wayne says flirtatiously. So Jack adjusts a delighted ninety pound Wayne. One of Wayne’s friends has given him a book of Monet’s paintings and we open it up and he takes one look at “Water Lilies,” and his face lights up as if he has just seen Jesus and Mary appear at the door, and he says to me, “My God! Look at the colors!” I remember how when I was younger and searching for the meaning of life, I imagined that if I was present at a friend or family member’s deathbed that maybe that person would impart some wisdom to me, tell me the meaning of life. But when I was visiting Wayne, I didn’t realize that his excitement over the colors was that wisdom that I was looking for. I was far too wrapped up in thinking that Monet was an artist embraced by the bourgeois and I wanted nothing to do with bourgeois values. When Wayne and I talked later on the phone after my visit he said to me, “I’m so happy that you’re with John. He lifted me up. He saw that I had slipped down in the bed and that I needed help getting back up. He asked if he could lift me up so that I could see everyone better. It was so easy for him to pick me up. He’s so tall. Honey, it’s great to have a big man. I’m so happy for you, he really loves you and he’s a wonderful person. I guess I’m giving you my blessing.”

And I start to feel a lump in my throat as I look at my mother unable to really see what is before her, and I am thinking that her illness will never produce any wisdom and what does it really matter anyway because I am too stupid to get it when it is given, and to understand that wisdom comes in such simple forms; in squares, and triangles, and circles; and that it takes years to fully understand the gifts you were given and that you passed over because of your own prejudices at the time, and I am wishing that I had not spent so much time in juvenile existential despair and that I had married Jack so that at least I could chatter on to my mother about my children, my big children, our big tall strong children, her grandchildren, and bring her news of their development, and my heart is cracking and my mind is racing and the tears are pooling, and I whisper to myself, “Stop it,” for the millionth time since my mother has become ill, “Stop it,” for the millionth time that week, “Stop it,” for the millionth time that day, and I reach out to hold her hand and she squeezes mine back and looks up at me and smiles with all this love in her eyes and I have to distract myself from these thoughts so I go back to my reading and,

“Oh, my God! Erica, look at that man, he’s so fat!”

“Mom, sh.”

“I’m not supposed to say things like that?”

“Well, we just don’t say those things out loud.”

“Oh…because it’s not polite?”

“That’s right. Why don’t you look at your magazine?”

My mother goes back to fake reading, and the fat man goes into the bathroom, and a few moments later, “Oh, look,” she says and points to a picture in the magazine, and then looks at me without naming what she’s looking at.

“It’s a peach. Do you like peaches?” I ask her.

“I love peaches.”

“Me too.”

“Let’s go get some.”

“After the dentist.”

“The dentist? Is that why we’re here? I think that they forgot about us. Which is fine, let’s go.”

Just then the woman at the check-in window calls out our name, which is great timing because I can see the fat man returning from the bathroom.

“Come on, mom, let’s go see the dentist.”

“The dentist? What does he want?”

“I don’t know, let’s find out.”

And we go into the inner chambers of the dental clinic where we wait some more and my mother waves her little Marlo Thomas “That Girl” wave to the children who don’t want to be there and she communicates the same to them and they all get each other. She goes to a baby in a stroller and coos to him and squeezes his chubby leg. She could never resist baby skin.

And then my mother is lying down on the dental chair and the dental assistant is telling me how beautiful my mother is, no make-up, cracked teeth, page boy hair cut, a blonde in need of a little touching up, and it’s true she is beautiful, even while she’s annoyed and grimacing.

The dentist asks me questions.

“What happened to her teeth?”

“She was supposed to have dental work done a while ago, but it was very expensive so she delayed. My sister, who’s a nutritionist, said her teeth started crumbling after she had radiation for a small tumor under her tongue. My sister begged her not to have the radiation, just the surgery, but my mother went ahead. Anyway, do you think that’s why her teeth started crumbling?” I ask him. Things pile up in life. Little problems beget big ones. Maybe the dental problems have caused her dementia. Nietzsche suffered from tooth decay and he became a raging…wait, my mother is not raging or raving.

“I don’t know, could be,” the dentist says. “My concern is her bone density. I’d like to take all of her teeth out at once, because this is probably confusing for her. The sooner we get them out we can begin with the mold and then have new teeth made. I have to find out from the lab if she can withstand that. We don’t want hemorrhaging. What’s your mother’s name?”

“It’s Anne.” Anna Banana plays the Piana.

“Hi Anne,” the dentist says.

“Hello, how do you know my name?”

“Your daughter told me.”

“My daughter. Isn’t she lovely?”

“Yes, she is. So you’re having trouble with your teeth?”

“Who said that?”

“Your daughter.”

“If she says so.”

“I’m going to take a look at them, okay.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“She’s funny.”

“Oh, yeah, she’s sassy. Watch out.”

My mother opens her mouth and the dentist starts to poke around talking about what he is seeing, talking about what needs to be done, talking, and I can’t really hear him because I am thinking about my mother’s brain, webbed with plaques and tangles and the dental tape that is within reach. Plaques and tangles. Plaque. Plaque. I want the dentist to wrap some dental tape around his fingers, flip open her head, and floss her brain. Get rid of the plaque, silly string after mischief night covering her neurons, choking the neurotransmitters trying to tell the other neurons to remember; remember the stove is on; remember the way home; remember the phone call; the meal just eaten; what is old is not new; what is new is not old; where we’re going; where we’ve been; what comes now makes sense because of what came before. Remember.

It’s raining cats and dogs. Thunder, lightening—by California standards, practically a hurricane. The clouds are so thick that even if the sun hadn’t set, it’d be dark. But it has—it’s eight o’clock, so in a sense, it’s twice as black as it’d normally be. Regardless, when Bob Harris gets a call from Long Beach Airport wondering if he’d be interested in flying three people—a man and two women—over to Burbank, five bucks each, he doesn’t hesitate.

“Sure,” he says, and is out the door and on his way in less than five minutes.

Bob’s got a single-engine instrument-rated commercial pilot’s license and owns his own plane. He spends a lot of time at the airport, getting in good with the guys in the tower so they’ll call him when freelance jobs like this pop up. It’s been about three years since he was stationed in the South Pacific during World War II, and for the time being, flying is fun, pays the bills.

Bob’s only twenty four, but after combat in the jungles of New Guinea, he figures there’s not much left in life to fear. Nothing can be worse than that, he thinks.

Once airborne, Bob circles around to gain some altitude and even though his radio isn’t working—it sounds like bursting kernels of popcorn—he confidently begins cruising north, just under the sky’s ceiling. Everyone’s getting to know each other, making small talk, when what sounds like a shot is fired. Only it’s not—it’s the engine backfiring, missing a beat here and there.

“Oh shit,” Bob mutters under his breath.

He immediately defrosts the carburetor, thinking that ice must’ve formed around it, but the engine only staccatos more.

“Excuse me, excuse me,” one of the women says, voice faltering. “What’s happening? What’s happening?”
Bob’s too busy to respond. He’s trying to figure out how to save their lives. The hairs on the back of his neck rise like freezing icicles when he realizes that he can’t call anyone for help and that because it’s night and stormy and dark and cloudy, he can’t safely execute an emergency landing.

By now the two women and the man are panicking. One of the women begins beating him on the back, screaming and crying and whimpering and begging him to tell them what’s going on. Frustrated, Bob reaches around and slaps the two people closest to him. “Shut up,” he says.

The plane is consistently losing altitude when the lights of the Burbank Airport appear. Bob’s radio jumps to life and he requests a straight approach. “What’s the nature of your request?” the tower asks. There are other planes ready to land that have been waiting in line longer than Bob.

Unable or unwilling to voice his reality, Bob lies. “I got three passengers that need to catch a connecting flight,” he says. As the plane nears the runway, the engine quits dead. Bob flares out a couple of times, enabling them to make it onto the asphalt. Their landing feels like an earthquake, but they’re alive—and ungrateful. The passengers go berserk and refuse to pay Bob his fifteen dollars. “You’re the worse pilot in the world!” they shout, but he doesn’t care.

“Get the hell outta here,” he says with a smile, just happy to be alive.

***

Bob Harris would be a rich man if he had a quarter for every time he found himself in a situation like this. In fact, now that he’s eighty four, he’d be more than comfortably retired, able to spend his free time leisurely putting around a golf ball or falling asleep waiting for the fish to bite. Although Bob doesn’t live in a world where he gets monetarily reimbursed for near-death experiences, he still takes every chance he gets to put his life in peril. From almost losing his head performing stunt work, to breaking all his ribs (plus his shoulder, scapula, knee and ankle) in a car racing accident, to nearly freezing to death in the middle of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Bob’s never once backed down from going face to face with the Grim Reaper.
This fact has not escaped his notice. “Isn’t that amazing, when you think about it?” he says, shaking his head and looking over his shoulder, as if the Reaper himself might be there, eagerly waiting for his next opportunity. “All my friends are gone, and a lot of them have been gone for years—when I was in my sixties, for God’s sake, they were dying. They died young. None of them were real old, so you don’t want to know me too long.”

Bob works out with my Dad at the gym, and when we first meet (at a Denny’s, where all the waitresses seem to know his name), I can’t help but think that he looks like a miniature, geriatric version of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He’s buff-his torso is shaped like an upside down triangle—and you can tell he exercises regularly. He’s got a full head of crystal white hair, but given his steady voice and appetite for pancakes (easy on the syrup), I assume he’s in his early seventies. When I ask him how old he is, he responds by asking how old I am. “If I had my wish, twenty six would be the age I’d like to be,” he says. “No younger, no older.”

Bob doesn’t stay in shape because he’s vain, and he doesn’t do it because he wants to live forever. He does it because he wants to race—flat track motorcycle racing to be specific. His son, Raider, first introduced him to the sport three years ago (that would be when he was eighty one), and Bob found this relatively young, American-style variety thrilling. Flat track was different than the other dirt bike sports he had previously competed in because riders pass one another as they whip through corners and turns, rather than on straight-aways. There was also the added bonus of a steel-covered boot—a flesh and blood anchor the biker drags in the dirt to prevent toppling over as he rounds these bends.

Bob chooses to describe the sport in a much different fashion: “You race around in a dirt circle and you’re all sideways. It’s so much fun.”

The flat track season begins in February and runs through October, but Bob’s able to practice year-round on a track he and his friends built in his backyard in Acton, California, a dusty, tumbleweed-pocked town about forty-five minutes north of Los Angeles.

Last season, out of three hundred racers, Bob was voted Most Improved Rider of the Year. This was just after he had his most recent up close and personal encounter with the Reaper. It was the last lap of his last race. He’d been able to pass every other biker, except one, who kept sneaking out from under his grip. “I start catching up to him as we’re going down the last straight-away and we go into the turn together,” he recounts. “We’re sliding there, doing about a hundred, and he’s right next to me. I remember thinking, ‘Oh God, if I take him and me out, we’re dead, right?’ And then I thought, ‘I am not shutting down.’ I just kept it screwed on all the way and I beat him.”

***

Bob says he doesn’t remember what year he was born, so I do the math and tell him it was 1923. “That sounds about right,” he says. “I’m so bad—I can’t keep dates.” He does remember, however, that he grew up in Long Beach, California, and that his father worked on the oil wells there. “My mom told me that we lived in a tent on Signal Hill and that when I was a baby she did my diapers in a tub over a bonfire. That’s really something, isn’t it?”

When Bob was about five years old, his parents and his two sisters (one older, one younger) moved to Oakland, where his dad played as a drummer for a few “big bands.” Soon thereafter, his mother and father, who were just eighteen and nineteen respectively when Bob was born, separated. All three kids were sent to boarding houses. Whereas his mother and grandmother eventually retrieved his sisters, Bob spent his entire childhood in boarding homes, attending a total of sixteen different grammar schools.

“My father was a good-looking guy and they should’ve never been married,” he says. “He was a young lover, you know what I mean? He didn’t want kids and he’d only come around about every six months. He asked me one time, ‘Do you love me?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I do, but not the same way as if you would’ve raised me.’”

Bob struck out on his own when he started high school, after he began working the graveyard shift at a ball bearing factory, where he earned enough to rent a room for ten bucks a week. He only made it through the tenth grade. After turning eighteen, he decided riding the rails would be far more interesting than going to school and work. One day, with nothing more than a change of underwear, an extra pair of socks and a jacket, Bob and a buddy of his hopped aboard a train with no clue where it was going. “You learned quick what cars to get into and what part of the car to sleep in so that if the freight train shifts you don’t get killed,” he explains. “There were different hobo villages and you learned not to sleep by the fire because it was full of cooties.”

The two left with no more than five bucks a piece and would beg for food from bakeries. “We would say, ‘Excuse me, could I buy fifty cents worth of stale whatever you got? My friend and I, we’re hungry,’” Bob recounts, with a grin that’s up to no good. “They’d give us a whole bag of day old pastry, and we’d get back on the train and as we’d go through the streets we’d wave and throw the donuts at cars.”

Bob stopped riding the rails after a close brush with the Reaper, although his decision had nothing to do with being scared straight. Rather, he just liked the town where the train stopped—or at least nearly stopped. Bob and his friend had been sleeping, and upon waking, they threw open the doors of their car only to be slapped in the face with one hell of a snowstorm. They didn’t know it yet, but they were in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, near Donner Pass. The two stepped down into the fresh blanket of waist-deep snow and began hiking towards what they hoped would be civilization. Fortunately for them, though clothed in nothing more pants, a T-shirt and a light jacket, theirs was not a Donner Party-esque destiny.

“We were nearly frozen to death when we found a cabin,” Bob says. “We broke into it through a window, found sleeping bags and beans and started a fire. The next morning, the front door opens and there’s the sheriff and the guy that owned the place. We talked him into letting us stay there and went to work for Union Pacific.”

From there, Bob eventually moved on and got hired at a shipyard before he was drafted into the army. Whereas his memory is fuzzy regarding every other specific time and place in his life, it’s sharp enough to draw blood in regards to his years as a soldier. “I went in January 3rd, 1943 and got out January 6th, 1946,” he tells me. It was on the GI Bill’s tab that he learned how to fly planes and earned his commercial pilot’s license, but it wasn’t long before he bored of that as well. “I’ve always liked to do something and not just say I did it, but to have accomplished it and be better than the average person. Then, when I have enough of it, I go on to something else.”

***

When Bob talks about outliving everyone he knows, he’s not just referring to high school pals and long-time neighbors. He’s referring to bona fide cultural icons. “All of my friends are dead,” he says, ticking them off on his fingers like a to-do list. “Lee Marvin’s dead, Keenan Wynn’s dead, Elvis Presley’s dead, Steve McQueen’s dead. I can go on and on through all the other actors and actresses I know—all dead.” Bob’s not showing off. After working for forty years as a television and film stunt man, these long-lost souls were genuinely a part of his inner circle.

Bob was working as a car salesman when he first met Keenan Wynn. The two became friends after Keenan found out Bob had a Jaguar he raced on the weekends. “Lemme give you my address,” Keenan had said. “Come over to my house tonight—I’m gonna loan you a good helmet.” When Bob arrived, the two enjoyed a few cocktails before Keenan brought out the helmet. It was hand-painted with images of Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse and Pluto, and much sturdier than the one he’d been using. Great, Bob thought. I need all the help I can get. That weekend he had a race at the Old Paramount Ranch, a particularly dangerous track where three guys had recently been killed.

“I’m sitting in my car, waiting for my race, when two guys come over,” Bob says. “‘We’re from the Los Angeles Times, could we get a picture of you?’ they asked. I thought, why me, I’m not famous, but okay. ‘Could you put the helmet on?’ they asked, so I put it on and they take these pictures. The next morning I get all these phone call from my friends saying, ‘Hey, your picture’s in the sports section.’ I say, ‘You’re kidding me.’ I get the Times and there’s the photo and it’s titled, James Dean Helmet Races Again—that was the helmet that was in the car with James Dean when he got killed! Well I took the helmet right back to Keenan and I said, ‘Man, I didn’t know that was his helmet! I don’t want to be racing in this!’”

After that, Keenan and Bob became close friends and would go dirt bike riding in the desert every weekend with Lee Marvin, Dan Blocker and Steve McQueen. Keenan got Bob his first entertainment industry gig, as a stand in, and then found him work as a stunt driver for a series he was starring in called “Couple Shooters.” Soon thereafter Bob got his Screen Actor’s Guild card and worked on anything and everything from “Bonnie and Clyde” with Warren Beatty to “Diamonds are Forever” with Jill St. John to “What’s Up Doc” with Barbra Streisand.

“Oh, I also stunted five movies with Elvis Presley,” Bob adds. “What happened was I was racing exotic Can-Am cars for Dan Blocker for this TV series he was the star of called ‘Bonanza.’ Our race cars were very valuable and the people filming the movie ‘Viva Las Vegas’ wanted to borrow them. They said, ‘You should use Bob, he’s got dark hair, he’s almost as tall as Elvis and not much older. When I did the driving it worked out well and Elvis liked me, so the next time they did something they were like, ‘Let’s get Bob again.’ Once we became friends it was a given that I’d stunt double for him.”

***

When Bob was still zooming around the track in cars, Patti, his wife, never missed a race. When he won, she would jump in his Can-Am and beam at the crowd while he circled around one final time, proudly waving the checkered flag.

“I’m not going,” she told him one Saturday, just before they were to leave for Santa Barbara.

“What? You’re kidding,” Bob replied, not even looking back as he made his way to the front door.

“No, really, I’ve got other things I need to do today.”

Bob shrugged his shoulders, went back and kissed her on the cheek. He didn’t want to get into an argument before a big race.

When Bob arrived at the track, his close friend Lance Reventlow (heir to the Woolworth fortune and Jill St. John’s husband) immediately asked where Patti was. “She didn’t want to come,” Bob said. Lance cocked his head to the side and furrowed his brow, but let it go at that.

Another one of Bob’s friends, Joe, was buckling in for his race and Bob approached the vehicle, bent down and tightened his seat belt. “Good luck, buddy, see you at the finish line,” he said.

“Hey Bobby, not so tight, that’s no good,” Joe said.

“You gotta tighten it man,” Bob replied.

“Nah man, loosen just a little for me, please.”

“Okay, you got it, you’re the boss.”

The race began and after a few laps, as Joe pulled into the second turn his vehicle began wildly spinning out of control, bouncing off the walls like a pin ball. Bob’s breath caught in his chest while the emergency response team sprinted onto the field. It was no use. Joe was killed instantly.

Bob felt like shit, but racing is like the circus—the show must go on, and after clearing the track of what was left of his friend’s vehicle, his number was up. I’ll win it for Joe, Bob thought. He started off the race strong, made it around a couple of times and increased his speed up to one hundred and forty as he entered that same second turn. Suddenly, someone popped a bubble of gum directly into his eardrum. Disoriented, Bob realized a millisecond too late that he hadn’t suddenly acquired a passenger, his suspension had snapped. He slammed onto his brakes and into the track’s cement wall, beamed off and headed directly toward the grand stands. Bob couldn’t hear the crowds’ screams, but he could see them turning and running for their lives. That’s the last thing he remembers.

He later woke up in the hospital and saw a doctor at the foot of his bed with a metallic clipboard. “Congratulations,” the doctor said. “You made it.” Bob couldn’t move and he couldn’t feel much. He had broken or cracked all of his ribs. His shoulder, scapula, knee and ankle were also broken. All the muscles in his back had been torn loose and three of his vertebrae had been crushed. Nobody needed to tell him he was lucky to be alive.

When Patti showed up at the hospital her eyes were swollen and her nose was red. “I knew it,” she whispered. “That’s why I couldn’t come.”

***

Bob’s not religious. He doesn’t pray and he doesn’t think God’s chosen to spare his life over others. His guess as to why he’s still alive is as good as anyone’s.

“I’m an agnostic,” he tells me. “I believe there’s a maker, I believe that there’s somebody, but other than that, nobody knows. There are just men who think they know. Everything that you read about religion was written by a man. Nobody knows what’s gonna happen and it’s just so silly to worry about it.”

I want to set up a stand at Vernissage, the weekend flea-market-cum-craft-fair in the middle of Yerevan, where all the tourists get their Armenian souvenirs, beautifully crafted and sold at rock bottom prices. I will sit at a table, and there will be someone with me in a white coat and a syringe and a tourniquet, sapping red fluid from my arm into tiny vials. I will dab white makeup on my face to appear pallid and there will be a sales rep passing out brochures explaining the prices and the authenticity and the dire necessity of the product. The sign, hand lettered like the notices of shows at the Opera House, will read “100% Armenian Blood”.

***

During this first month of my Fulbright fellowship here in the Armenian capital, I have made an unlikely discovery: Some people don’t understand that I’m Armenian. They meet me, hear my name, see that I don’t comprehend most—if not all—the language that they are speaking, watch me smile wanly, and ask me where I’m from. The answer is that I’m from New York, which is the answer New Yorkers give when they are traveling abroad in order to separate themselves from ugly Americans. I have never been a fan of New York; I do like the boroughs, but I find Manhattan offensive—with its fast walkers and cell phone talkers—and Manhattan is what people think of, generally, when you mention New York, so perhaps I should say Brooklyn, but then no one will know what I’m talking about. In any case, I think I started saying that I’m from New York so that I won’t sound so American, which will somehow make me more Armenian.

At some point, while I am standing there shamelessly wanting to be embraced by my fellow countrypeople, I am asked Duk hye ek? Are you Armenian?

And I reply confidently, Yes hye em. I am Armenian.

Both mother and father are Armenian?

Yes, I explain. My grandparents came from Anatolia. A.k.a. Eastern Turkey, a.k.a the former Armenian provinces of the Ottoman Empire, a.k.a. historical Western Armenia. I have to make this distinction because I am in the newly independent nation of Armenia, a.k.a. the former Soviet Republic, a.k.a., the former Armenian province of the Russian Empire, a.k.a. historical Eastern Armenia. Although in Yerevan there are diasporan Armenians of various generations, with roots as Western Armenians, the majority seem to have a local history from Eastern Armenia.

My parents were born in America, I add to further explain my foreignness.

And you’re Armenian? They ask just to make sure.

Yes, I’m Armenian.

Huh. Suspicious glance; fake, sorry smile; head nod: you’re not really Armenian.

I suppose it’s the combination of my appearance and aura and lack of language and their own experiences with diasporan Armenians that lead them to this deduction, and I shouldn’t put so much weight on it.

But I’ve spent so much of my life, from childhood to the present day, explaining that I’m Armenian to Americans, going into detail about its geographic location and complicated history, struggling to own who I am as an Armenian, that you would think that in the one place where people know where and what Armenia is, and how much it has struggled to own itself, that I would be understood. But instead I am frequently and decidedly told I’m not who I think I am.

***

“You have to get our mountain back,” Dr. Armenian (not his real name) told me as I was lying in a hospital bed in New York, a few months before my trip. He was speaking of Mount Ararat, a national symbol of Armenia, which is actually located twenty miles over the border from Armenia itself, over in Anatolia, a.k.a. Eastern Turkey, a.k.a. historical Western Armenia. The location of the peak is also symbolic, just outside Armenians’ reach, a reminder of all they lost during WWI and the genocide that displaced them from the Western side of their identity, like a twin whose identical sibling has perished.

The hospital stay was the end result of the U.S. government requiring that I prove I was physically fit to travel abroad for a year. As I sat waiting for over an hour for a Polish doctor in my Polish neighborhood, I had an epiphany that an Armenian doctor would probably be more emotionally and ethnically invested in helping me my get medical clearance to go to Hayastan, the homeland. After doing a search for Armenians from the endless online list provided by my HMO, I chose Dr. Armenian for his name and his office’s close proximity. He seemed to be the only Armenian doctor in the medical office, in a predominantly Latino neighborhood. Although he was terse when we first met and he shook my hand, once I told him in the tiny examining room that I was going to Armenia on a Fulbright, he began opening up. He was from the Middle East but had lived in New York for twenty years. He knew Arabic and told me about the Armenian community in his home country. He wanted me to know he was successful; he had a son who attended an Ivy League college. As I had hoped, he immediately jumped on board to get my medical papers in order.

When I went back a week later to pick up the results of my blood and urine tests, the doctor told me that he had discovered some bacteria in my urine. He gave me medicine for a urinary tract infection, though I had experienced no symptoms. I dubiously took the antibiotics for several days before waking up one morning with a horrible headache and a fever and my neck ached and the next thing I knew I was in the hospital getting a spinal tap, like a business transaction. The hospital doctors didn’t know what was wrong, and via the process of elimination deduced that I was having an allergic reaction to the antibiotic. Looking back now, I know it wasn’t his fault, but at the time I blamed the doctor because almost immediately Dr. Armenian had appeared to be a quack.

During the initial physical, he had asked me what kind of Armenian name was Nancy. When I told him my baptized name was Nevart, he had a problem with that too. “That’s for an old lady. You need something like Nanoush or Naneh.” He informed me that he was also a plastic surgeon, and that I should sit up straight because what I had on my chest was worth tens of thousand dollars. When he found out I was a writer, he offered me a job with him, writing his life story.

On that day we first met, when he was drawing my dark red blood, Dr. Armenian said, “This is precious stuff.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“It’s Armenian blood.” I have to admit that I smiled at the combination of his blatant nationalism, an ethnic camaraderie that transcended the doctor-patient relationship, and a kind of affirmation of my heritage. But then Dr. Armenian ruined the mood by telling me that the people he treated, immigrants from Latin and South America, didn’t possess such special blood, and that they were uneducated, like monkeys.

I ended up in the hospital for five days for tests and to recover from the spinal tap. Dr. Armenian came to visit me every day. Though I was angry with him for prescribing the antibiotic, I never said so, treating him politely like an older relative. Because I am a writer, I enjoyed seeing his distinct form—thin, slightly hunched body, horn-rimmed glasses, prominent nose—as he entered my room, like a character in a novel. I eagerly noticed that he wore the same khaki pants every day with the same stain near the right pocket, at the same time that I watched myself lying in a hospital bed; I wondered if my attraction to observe strange characters had gone too far, into the pathological.

Dr. Armenian kept up a tough love bit, acting like I was a strong warrior who needed to get back into the fight. “What are you doing, lying in this bed?” he would ask me as he took my pulse, his fingers on the inside of my wrist. We never discussed the validity of my medical clearance, which he had already given me. And when the insurance company gave me a hard time about some of the charges, he objected on my behalf. Still, once I got out of the hospital, I removed him as my General Practitioner. I closed the pop-up window that asked me the reason.

A year later, I will run into him on an organized hike three hours outside of Yerevan. We will be walking by the side of a small alpine pond when I will recognize him and say his name. He is here for a medical conference, he will tell me. “You look wonderful!” he will say in awe, faced with my sudden presence from the past.

As we stride through a mountaintop meadow filled with flowers, he will say, “When I first met you, you were so fragile that your system couldn’t even handle a little antibiotic.” I won’t tell him that when I did an internet search of the antibiotic, I found many instances of allergic reactions similar to mine. “The homeland has made you strong and healthy,” he will claim. I will nod my head and smile.

At first he had told me that I was going to rescue our fragile homeland, but in actuality, the doctor was also thinking the opposite, that I had a weak constitution, or “organism” as people like to say here. For sure, there is some kind of symbiotic relationship between ancient Armenia and its returning lost children.

I will watch him as he navigates a difficult spot, a log over a brook and then a big jump down a steep incline. “Not bad for sixty years old!” he will tell me, continuing to hike. He is here by himself, with neither a companion nor the other doctors from the conference.

And then I will remember the first time we met, when he asked me to write his life story, how he showed me his scars on the surface of his skin from when he had been shot in the head—the spots where the bullet went in and out, under his eye and the scruff of his neck—as he was walking one day in Manhattan.

***

We have been seeing each other only a few weeks, but it’s a running joke with Arman
now. “Hey, you really are Armenian girl.” The first time he said it was when I told him I needed to feel more connected emotionally before having sex. “You know what they say about Armenian girls; you have to know them forty years before they let you hold their hand.”

I glared at him.

“You don’t think is funny?”

He said it on another occasion, very sweetly, when he was telling me how much he liked my eyes, my nose, my mouth, my teeth. “You have Armenian nose. And like Armenian girl, you have black eyes, and a little mustache.”

Once, we were making out on my couch and my mother called in the midst of it so I left the room for about ten minutes to speak to her and when I came back and told him who it was, he gave me a big smile and said it again, “Oh, you really are Armenian girl,” chuckle chuckle, then a hug.

Today, I wasn’t feeling well, and asked if he knew a place where I could get some yogurt and wheat soup— tan abour—but they call it by a Russian name, spaz, here. He said he didn’t know, since he doesn’t often eat at restaurants. “If we can’t find it, we can make it,” he said.

The truth is, I do know how to make it. “I think I could,” I said, imagining how to boil the wheatberries and the madzoon.

“Oh, now, you really are Armenian girl.”

“Do you have a problem with that?” I asked defensively.

“Not with you,” he said. The understanding was that he was initially drawn to me because I’m not very Armenian, so when I exhibit the traits, it’s surprising. Similarly, some of my more sexually outspoken poems, that I wrote when I was in my early-twenties, have made an impression after they were published here precisely because they came from a girl who was Armenian, though she was living in California at the time. Not long ago my friend Ara, who grew up in Beirut and moved to Pasadena as a teenager, said of those early poems, “You just couldn’t believe an Armenian girl wrote them.” And Viken, who grew up here, said, “You expressed what every girl in the village goes through but does not express.”

“Even Hrair said this,” Arman went on.

“What, that I’m a real Armenian girl?”

“He said you don’t seem like you are from New York.”

When I was going to college in suburban Massachusetts, no one suspected I grew up in a middle class/working class town nearby. Because of my appearance and aesthetic sensibility, acquaintances assumed I was a New Yorker. Twenty years later, after living in New York for seven years, I struggled to accept such a mythologized and huge place, the opposite of the unknown and tiny Armenia. Now, I feel like New York is a part of me, but maybe because I am shy a lot of the time with Armenians, it is hard for them to imagine me pushing through crowds on the subway.

I suppose it’s an asset, not looking or seeming to be what you are, because then you can be free, you can be anything. You can just sit back and watch the reflections of what people think you are, dual images in a plate glass window.

***

Arman says that he’s from another planet. One night, after we got into our first fight, he came by my place and played some Radiohead and lay on my floor. The song was “Subterranean Homesick Alien” and I cried and cried, imagining him growing up here, a free spirit, someone who smiles all the time while the majority frowns, and then later, I realized, I was crying for myself, for the teenager I was in small town suburban Massachusetts, the girl from the planet Armenia, listening to my Walkman, music the only way out.

***

In the Armenian communities in Iran, Maral told me, if an Armenian gets a promotion and is successful in the wider Iranian world, the Armenians say, disparagingly, that he or she is half Iranian. I was sitting in her art gallery in Yerevan, sipping tea, ostensibly to help her with her English and she with my Armenian. Maral considers herself part Spiurkahye (diasporan Armenian) and part Armenian, since she came here as a college student from Iran. She was comparing this mentality on Armenian identity that she experienced in Iran to one that she has also found here, the one that I had been a victim of.

“They’re not modern,” she said of the name-calling Armenians. “They don’t realize, that in the west, you can’t survive unless you become a part of the place.”

I nodded my head; I told her that the Armenian community in America can be insular, but that compared to elsewhere, there’s probably more freedom to be “un-Armenian”. “Maybe in the Armenian communities of the middle east, they’ve had to be even more protective?” I wondered aloud to her, and this time she nodded her head.

“They want to protect the culture, to make sure they don’t—” and she gestured with her hands, as if taking something from the other —”lose it,” I finished her sentence.

Maral sent me on my way with some honey and some homeopathic medicine for a sore throat, and I walked down Amiryan wondering why Armenians are still so afraid of losing our identity when we’ve been going to other parts of the world and becoming something else from the very beginning. People, diasporans especially, are obsessed with protecting the language, protecting the culture, protecting the blood.

And I suppose I feel this way, too; part of the reason I’m here is to restore what was lost in me. It’s been upsetting to see that the West is already here: billboards, bottled Frapuccinos, the threat of McDonald’s, and historical homes ruthlessly torn down for the sake of condominiums that only foreigners can afford. They’re the negative homogenizing effects of globalization that are happening in all little countries everywhere, all over the post-Soviet places.

So this is why I want to draw my blood from my body and sell it at a stand at Vernissage: a precious keepsake, a memento from the homeland, sold for not nearly what it’s worth. Like a twin mourning her dead sibling: I embody her, but I also have to let her go.

When I moved to Idaho Falls in August 2005, I couldn’t take my new home seriously. It was a 75-unit apartment complex with a name meant to evoke grandeur and respite: Shadow Canyon. Two-story buildings ringed a parking lot and a grassy area, and tall Ponderosa pines provided the aesthetics that vinyl siding couldn’t. It was within walking distance to the mall, one of two Wal-Marts, and a buffet called Chuck-a-Rama. More importantly, it was within walking distance to a technical college. There, my partner in good times and bad, Paul, had taken a part time job teaching English to pre-nursing students. We’d been together ten years, had never done the marriage thing, had no plans for kids, and had followed each other around the country for school and jobs. Idaho Falls was one more destination.

Within moments of discovering the apartments, we elbowed each other about the cheesy slogan: Shadow Canyon, Distinctive Living. We threatened to make each other eat at Chuck-a-Rama. We were hesitant about moving to this new city, where we knew no one, but we took solace in our ability to achieve ironic detachment in record time. Shadow Canyon required only a hundred dollar security deposit and let tenants lease month-to-month. We ponied up the c-note and paid $450 for a month’s rent on a downstairs two-bedroom with a storage unit, a porch, and a covered parking space.

I didn’t exactly have a job yet. I would work Fridays in the tech college’s writing center (at least they had one). In addition, I would substitute for two weeks while one of the instructors in Adult Basic Education toured Europe. I would need a more lucrative job. Paul’s position existed in a category somewhere below part time. Shortly after arriving, he learned his paychecks would come every five or six weeks, a random schedule not even the payroll office could explain. As we unpacked, we discussed a financial strategy: no cable, no high-speed Internet, no cell phones, no restaurants – unless I chanced into an awesome job. We’d already forgone our friends up north at the University of Idaho in Moscow, where we had earned our M.F.A. degrees in 2004, then worked customer service jobs while trying to decide what to do next. The pending year in Idaho Falls seemed like the right time to pare our lives down to the core, to the necessities.

Per my new credo to Get It Together, I applied for whatever Idaho Falls had to offer. It wasn’t much: weekend obituary writer at the newspaper, private tutor, or grant writer for an environmental planning office. I polished my genie’s lamp of a résumé -scholarships and grants, awards and publications, B.A., M.A., M.F.A.

Because I wasn’t a complete fool (sober subtraction had me out of money by November), I also applied for less prestigious jobs. Clerk at a yarn store, clerk at a sign shop, and SOS Staffing. It was one of those places that provided temporary employees. Placeholders. I could be a placeholder. I could sit at the reception desk and tell people that the secretary would be out for two weeks while her broken foot healed.

Because I was a fool in other areas, I applied for those less-prestigious jobs with the prestigious résumé. I knew I was overqualified. It had never mattered before. From the first moment of my existence, people had coached me to stand out in the crowd. As a result, a week was the longest I’d gone without a job.

Only later would it occur to me that Idaho Falls was not like the college towns I’d thrived in for my entire adult life. Employers had different criteria, of unspoken caution and suspicion. Crowds and their comfort were worshipped. Those standing out were odd, possibly dangerous.

That Pioneering Spirit

Most people think Idaho is potatoes, whitewater, and Sun Valley. The lentil fields of the panhandle get ignored, and few know that one of the oldest trees in the world is hidden in Idaho’s St. Joe National Forest. Sun Valley is overrated – visit Craters of the Moon instead. Idaho is where Hemingway killed himself, and where Philo T. Farnsworth invented the television, only to enter a patent battle with a Russian who claimed he invented it. Idaho is bitter ends. It’s the astounding California wealth in the resort towns, and it’s the intellectual poverty of militias and the Aryan Nation. You can live in a shack for virtually nothing, or you can build a mansion on a mountain and clear a strip for your private plane. The 83,500 square miles of terrain gets two time zones over numerous mountain ranges, but there is only one area code, 208, so scattered and thin is the population. Look one direction and it’s spectacular. Look the other way, or just blink your eyes, and it’s vaguely terrifying, a neo-west sublime.

Idaho Falls exists because of mining, Mormon pioneers, and the Snake River, which runs wide and fast through the center of town. Fortune-seekers (of gold or salvation) lined up to cross the Snake at the one bridge, known as Taylor’s Crossing, and later they called it Eagle Rock, and still later they renamed it Idaho Falls. The name shifted as citizens changed their perceptions. When the second wave of miners built more river crossings, the Taylors had to relinquish; when eagles on rocks failed to attract tourists, a state name plus the majesty of tumbling water did the trick – no one minded that the falls were constructed, or that a dam regulated the whole spectacle. Today, current residents half the city’s name to IF, pronounced as initials, as if verbalizing the four syllables of Idaho Falls wastes precious time.

When the cores of mountains had been excavated and the EPA banned smolters, homesteaders farmed the flat Snake River Plain, rich with volcanic ash and the remnants of a prehistoric sea. They latticed canals and seeded vast potato fields. In homage, some Idaho license plates sport an image of a baked Russet, complete with a pat of butter, hovering in the sky like a deity.

When I first arrived, all I could see was the ugly flatness of southeast Idaho, so different from the postcard scenery of northern Idaho. Even with the vast Sawtooth Mountains to the west, and the spectacular Tetons to the east, on most days I saw only the scrubby plains and the rusty arches of endless irrigation systems. This Idaho was different from the college-town Idaho. I saw the sprawl of the city, the endless parking lots and malls and giant retailers. I saw the boarded-up storefronts of the old downtown. And blatant tourist traps, like Yellowstone Bear World, a place that siphoned traffic with its tsk-tsking pamphlets about how the real Yellowstone is no fun now that you couldn’t feed the bears. No bike lanes, either – Hummers and minivans idled everywhere, Bush/Cheney stickers on their bumpers and yellow magnetic ribbons near their gas tanks. I could only see that Idaho Falls had something distasteful at every intersection.

There Are A Lot Of Things That Can Come In Your Windows When You Live On The Ground Floor (Part I)

The boys in the upstairs apartment were thumping something massive down the hallway, and that was why I was awake at 3 a.m., standing in my hallway and watching the light fixtures jiggle. Again. I was confounded over what they were always moving up there. It couldn’t be good, that sound at that hour. Usually I went back to sleep, or Paul banged on their door and told them to cut it out and then we would lie awake, arguing over who should have banged on their door, and then we would fall back to sleep. But tonight would end up being different, because in the sleepy, irritated edge of my vision, I noticed something alive in the bathtub.

I blinked like a fool in the vinyl glare. The thing was a goddamn hobo spider. Poisonous. Arched legs holding a body like a bullet. He was the size of the drain. He was on the drain, on all of it, slinking one scrappy leg through a drop of water, then raising it to what looked like long fangs ending in tiny punching bags.

Hobo spiders are hairy brown brutes, like rawhide spiders. They can hunt prey on foot – the web is optional. Their long legs are feats of angles and joints. The hobo spider got its name because it roams on those long legs. They scout and sprint and pounce. They claim corners for a few days, then move on. They are like bad natives following the herd. They have no patience. They like warm kitchens and bathtub puddles and will kamikaze from one to the other via their favorite highway, the edge where the floor meets the wall. They are three-square-meals-a-day spiders. They drive trucks, own guns, don’t give a damn. They have infested Idaho Falls.

I hated the boys upstairs. I hated the small, cheap apartment with a bleach-stained carpet and rickety screen door and walls so shoddy we’d already knocked a dent in one. I hated that none of my initial job applications have been acknowledged, that my money was dwindling, that Paul’s first paycheck was still weeks away and we were buying groceries with a credit card. Even with all that, I hated the hobo spider in the bathtub in a way that I had not hated anything, because I could do something about it. I would kill him.

I nailed him with a stream of window cleaner and the big spider shuddered. Motherfucker. I soaked him and hoped the force of the spray inflicted further damage. He shrank into a ball of legs, making himself small and maybe dead. Don’t play possum with me. The boys upstairs had dragged whatever it was to the steps, and now they were thumping it down. Because the steps were metal and the apartments were poorly constructed, the sound reverberated through my living room wall. I was reminded of something I was sure I had never heard: falling manhole covers. The spider started uncurling, leg by leg.

Window cleaner wasn’t free; I couldn’t waste it on vermin. So I doused the spider with a cup of hot water. With his mean legs spread wide, he spun in the current, then scrambled to the far end. I began filling the tub. He drowned and it took too long.

I pushed him into a dustpan and threw him outside. The boys from upstairs had disappeared. All was silent. I wished I could go straight back to bed, but I knew I couldn’t. A poisonous spider in my living space had apparently triggered a primeval reaction – my arm hairs stood straight each time I recalled that first glance into the tub, and I couldn’t step replaying it in my head. My jaw was clenched so hard it sent bolts of ache up to my ears. I was on red alert, studying the spider-brown carpet before each step.

I turned on my computer and listened to the dial-up connection crackle its way on to the web. I googled “hobo spiders” and knew it was not a good idea, to further scare myself with enlarged photos and alarming testimonials. Sure enough, their bite could be necrotic, killing a radius of skin and tissue. In rare cases, when the venom reached bone, amputation was necessary. In common cases, you sported a nasty blister, took a regime of antibiotics, and were left with a permanent scar.

I also learned they are native to England and Europe. They made the utmost of roaming by stowing away to America in shipping crates, then on into Idaho via railroad ties. They thrived in the irrigated potato fields and the lush lawns. And this: I learned that their hairy fangs with punching bags at the tips weren’t just fangs – they were the hobo spider version of testicles, hanging off the hobo spider version of a face.

The Things We Did For Money

On Tuesdays, Paul would leave our ground-floor haven for hobo spiders and drive three hours to teach English 101 at the tech college’s outreach center in the Salmon Mountains at the edge of the largest unbroken wilderness in the lower forty-eight. He would stay the night at a motel decorated with elk heads. He’d call to check in and we’d exchange outlandish lies about who really went to Chuck-a-Rama instead of teaching or applying for jobs.

The next morning, he would drive three hours home. He would bring the Salmon newspaper. One issue, we marveled over the Caves For Rent classified. Another issue, we discussed the article about how the wolves were menacing the hunters and must be shot. Both raised in Ohio, we agreed that we would like to see a wolf in the wild. Then he would drive two hours to a high school in Driggs, at the base of the backside of the Grand Tetons, where he taught another evening English 101 class. He would buy a tuna salad sandwich at the gas station and drive home, arriving at midnight. To make good use of the nearly ten hours of driving, he had gone to the public library and borrowed the unabridged audio book version of Moby Dick.

In late September, my August applications all for naught, I applied for six more jobs. Three were somewhat respectable and could even be considered careers: assistant to the director at the natural history museum; copywriter for a mail-order beauty products enterprise; and a marketing office that wasn’t even hiring, but I told them they needed a writer and I was their girl. Three others were worst-case scenarios: a baker, a florist, and Pier 1, but only because it was within walking distance.

While I waited for offers to come pouring in because how could anyone not hire me, I had my two-week substitute gig at the tech college to keep me occupied.

The class was called Workplace Essentials, and it ran like a seminar: seven hours a day for four days of job-finding and job-keeping skills, and then the students received a certificate of achievement, suitable for framing. Then I would do it all over again for the second week’s set of students. The point was to learn how to get hired and learn how to advance, all by improving your customer service skills. Lessons centered on a 70-page self-help workbook titled The New Me, A Success Story. The workbook was like a primer on the American dream, updated for the service-industry job market of the 21^st century: If you know your personality type and know how to deal with difficult people, you’re on your way.

I had my doubts, including anxiety over the irony that I had recently and unsuccessfully applied for customer service jobs. However, I needed money to replace the cleaning solvents I was wasting while neutralizing hobo spiders from afar. For $12.50 an hour, I could feign interest and expertise. The three students were adults stuck in dead-end jobs (second-shift at Sam’s Club, second-shift at the ice cream distributor, second-shift dishwasher). They tore into their workbooks with intent and curiosity. They were going to be sincere about this. They filled out surveys about attitudes and assertiveness and self-esteem. They took The Dessert Personality Test, learning that if they liked chocolate cake, they were adventurous, ambitious, and passionate. But if vanilla cake was their thing, they were fun, sassy, and humorous. They peered at each other’s workbooks and vowed to make their families contemplate the dessert aspect of personality. I assured them it was OK to like chocolate cake AND vanilla cake. This is really cool, they told me.

After each test or survey in the workbook, I facilitated discussions about good habits, cooperation, even hygiene. We told stories about horrible jobs, about difficult coworkers, about our goals. At break time, we would congregate outside, share vending machine snacks, and stare at the Wal-Mart across the street. The dishwasher, a tough older woman covered in barbed wire tattoos, would always talk about being a recovering alcoholic; the single mom who worked at the ice cream distribution center would check in with the babysitter and say things like, “Just give her ice cream. She really likes ice cream.” One time, the guy who worked at Sam’s Club said he wished the city would cut down the few scraggly trees between us and Wal-Mart, so he could see it better. He said he felt comforted when he saw the sign, the building, the colors. Every weekend, he took his six kids to Wal-Mart, where they spent his Sam’s Club paycheck. I had no idea what to say to him. In my entire life, I’d made two purchases at Wal-Mart, a purposeful avoidance. After break, after these strange and fascinating and terrifying insights into the lives of my students, we’d head back in for an afternoon self-awareness activity. One day we drew pictures of ourselves as gardens. I drew a giant pine tree with myself hiding under it.

I wanted to tell my students that the soul-sucking bottom line of capitalism would ruin them, would dash their aspirations. I wanted to tell them about Marxism, about workers of the world uniting, about Buy Nothing Day, about subverting the system, about the rationale for shoplifting, about not respecting the system that was dehumanizing them.

On the last day, we looked through the classifieds. My students picked jobs to apply for. So did I.

The Mormons

Idaho Falls and its surrounding regions are so heavily populated by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints that you could call the region North Utah and be accurate in terms of demographics. The Idaho Falls/Pocatello phone book lists over 500 entries for various regional things associated with the LDS – stakes, wards, genealogy centers, and a slew of businesses collected under Deseret Industries, or DI, because calling something by its initials is a hot trend in ID. You could say about someone, “She’s LDS, works in IF at DI,” and it would make total sense (like the vanity plate that read RULDS2). What makes Idaho Falls a regional draw is the Mormon temple. Virtually every town in Idaho has a Mormon church – but in 2005 there were only three temples, with a fourth under construction. The oldest was in IF.

The temple, which is huge, white, and windowless, is Idaho Falls. That it has a prominent downtown location, in perfect composition with the waterfalls, is no mistake. It’s never not a nice photo – the roiling whitewater, the clear sky, this massive white temple surrounded by irrigated lawn and a black iron fence. Gazillions of photos must exist. The temple looks like a wedding cake, both in tier and color, but the architectural style has a proper name: ziggurat, a pyramid of varying rectangular chunks meant as a symbolic set of steps to the heavens. It has no windows, no stained glass, and even the entrance is not so obvious, obscured on one side by a walled walkway. There is a single spire topped with a golden statue of the angel Moroni. In LDS theology, Moroni appeared to Joseph Smith in the nineteenth century and told him where to find the buried gold plates that would become the Book of Mormon. As a statue, Moroni looks like a gilded trumpeter in nineteenth century garb.

Prior to moving to Idaho Falls, I’d never seen a Mormon temple, didn’t even know they had temples. What I knew of the religion were the doctrines that made them sound like the cult they insisted they weren’t – the old stain of polygamy; the five-year supply of food in each basement; the retroactive baptisms for the dead; the shunning of alcohol, caffeine, and cussing; and of course their ubiquitous young missionaries, knocking on doors and offering suburban salvation. And I knew that Mormon intellectuals, such as writer Terry Tempest Williams, had been called to the floor and threatened with excommunication.

I quickly assimilated one more doctrine that would come to define my stay in Idaho Falls. Non-Mormons are called gentiles. Even Jews become gentiles. Gentiles are not allowed to enter the inner sanctum of the temples because the area is sacred, and only Mormons are sacred. They get to enter by special approval only, such as when they’ve fulfilled their tithing duties and get a special “recommend” from their bishop. You pay your way, in one form or another, and I was as broke as they come. The only currency I had was my cynicism and the perpetual pocket change of doubt.

Long-time critics of organized religion, Paul and I dropped the IF temple into the category of Chuck-a-Rama – we dealt with it by creating sarcastic accusations about which of us harbored a secret desire to convert, just so we could get to that guarded inner sanctum. Paul liked the notion that God talks directly to Mormon prophets (only men can become prophets.) He spent entire evenings role-playing as prophet, trying to order me to do dishes, by God’s command. I was not sure what there was for a woman to like about the religion. Mormon women were beholden to marry young, have many children, and obey their husbands.

So, instead of mock-interest, I fantasized about making a documentary about us trying to get into the temple. Paul, who had years of theatre mischief in his blood, would be the star. First, I’d film him entering a Catholic church, and he’d reveal to a Catholic at the door that he was not a Catholic, but was it OK if he entered? And the Catholic would say yes. Repeat as necessary for every denomination in the shadow of the temple. And then to the ziggurat itself, where a polite and superhumanly blond young Mormon might say no, not until you convert and pay a percentage of your income. I’d edit in footage of the door-knocking missionaries who always wanted to come into our living room. They wanted into my living room but I couldn’t enter their temple?

Soon, though, I stopped being amused by biting daydreams. It had to do with all the jobs I wasn’t getting. Initially, I assumed I was vastly overqualified for everything Idaho Falls had to offer. The more I thought about the temple, I realized it was the one thing in town for which I was vastly underqualified. And it was occurring to me that I was not really overqualified for the jobs in the classifieds. I was wrongly-qualified, if there is such a thing. To put it another way, I didn’t have the one right credential, the single affiliation that mattered in a place dominated by one religion.

For a Gen-Xer who had mainlined situational irony her entire life, this irony left me nothing but pissed. There was a good chance that my potential employers were Mormon, because if the phone book had 500 Mormon-related entries, and if the population here supported a temple, then yes, probably all who had scanned my résumé were part of the religion. Was my history of secular accomplishment a red-flag warning to any Latter-Day Saint? Were they all gatekeepers, and this whole town a temple?

I felt peculiar. I couldn’t shake the notion that I was being excluded, passed over, looked down upon. Shunned. I was an outsider in a place I didn’t want to be a part of anyway. But I had to become a small part if I wanted money, and I needed money to get out. And I couldn’t see a way out because I couldn’t see a way in.

I didn’t know how to proceed. Should I give up my job search in the area? Should I stay the course in the land of the enemy? I could tell myself to stop thinking of Mormons as the enemy, but I also couldn’t, a realization that was both appalling and strangely fascinating. Should I self-finance my documentary because it would be awesome and a major indie distributor would pick it up after it premiered at Sundance? Was I delusional?

There Are a Lot of Things That Can Come in Your Windows When You Live on the Ground Floor (Part II)

Shadow Canyon’s property manager, a guy I’ll call Smith, was strange from the beginning. When we first met him and said “Hi,” he said “wish I was!” And what do you say to that? Because you’re never going to smoke up with your property manager, but it’s kind of cool that you could.

Smith was in his mid-forties. He wore old soccer t-shirts. County Soccer Camp, 1992. Kick it! He walked bent at the waist, with short fast steps. He was proud of winning three of four court cases against negligent tenants. He kept a wooden baseball bat under his desk.

One night, a neighbor named Judy knocked at our door. Paul answered, and she asked for the lady of the house. That, we supposed, was me. Judy wanted to know if I had been sexually harassed by Smith. Had he said things that made me uncomfortable, and had I noticed him looking in my windows? Had my underwear drawer been disturbed? When she got home from work, she always checked her panty drawer, and it was always disturbed.

According to Judy, Smith kept porn on his office computer and had peeped in her windows at all hours and was using the master key to gain access to her underwear drawer. She, for one, was no longer going to feel afraid in her own home! She had inquired at a fair housing action office, and they were going to look into the matter. In the meantime, she’d taken the situation into her own hands.

Tonight she was going door to door to find out who else was a victim. She’d written a letter and made copies for each lady of the house, with hopes that we would each write a similar letter and then we’d present them to the fair housing action office, a unified front of self-aware female tenants.

I took a copy. Thanks to nine years of college, I immediately noticed her gratuitous use of quotation marks:

If, “Smithson P Baker,” has made any “Sexual comments,” towards you in “Any way,” or if Smithson P Baker has “Harassed you in any “Sexual form,” Could you please write a “Statement” about “What and if possible when,” it happened.

The letter continued for about 500 words and 74 quotation marks and was peppered with random capitalization. Smith had, in fact, made me uncomfortable. But so had Judy’s writing style. Back when I was a teaching assistant, I’d lectured my students on this very situation: you undermine your argument when your writing adheres to rules only you know about.

Her letter was a wreck. It was not revised, not proofread. Did that mean I couldn’t trust her logic? Anyone who reads a newspaper once a week knows that you don’t use quotation marks and capital letters that way. So she must not read, must not be curious, must not be smart, must be a psycho feminist out to bring down men for being men. I slipped right down that slope.

So I didn’t give Judy what she wanted. I didn’t tell her that a day ago, I had gone to Smith’s office to complain about the noise from the upstairs boys. Smith interrupted to tell me I “sure was pretty,” and that I shouldn’t tell Paul he was hitting on me.

I stared at him and then pressed on with my litany of complaints. Smith leaned forward and pointed to the lower edge of my tattoo, visible below my t-shirt sleeve. “You best keep that covered,” he said. “There’s people in this town who won’t hire you for it. I don’t agree with them, but they’re everywhere. You want a job, you play by their rules.”

The Mormons, again. They believed tattoos made the body permanently impure. I tugged my sleeve down and repeated my concern about the boys upstairs. Smith backed off and said he’d give them a warning. I considered him carefully, trying to decide how to understand him, now. On one hand, he wasn’t a Mormon, so we should stick together. On the other hand, he was a raging sexist, so I should firebomb his office.

So, I could have written a statement for Judy. I had a log for her fire. Instead, I told her I’d call if anything suspicious happened. The problem was, everything in Idaho Falls seemed suspicious. I could see a number of battlefronts. Picking one as a priority seemed pointless.

Idaho Falling (September 29, 2005)

It was better than an episode of Cops.

Just past midnight, and the noise from the upstairs boys was so intense it was winning awards. Loud music, rounds of laughter, squeals from girls, and once again, the threatening thumps that generated a hitherto unknown stress in my gut. I thought they must be wrestling on the kitchen floor, the only action that made sense, given the accompanying racket. Paul dialed the police, and two units were dispatched to Shadow Canyon, Distinctive Living. We hoped the boys would get a noise citation, a reason for eviction. We waited in our dark living room, poured ourselves a single glass of cheap whiskey, and watched two squad cars arrive, in stealth mode, lights off, silent as spiders.

Because all the good building materials were used in the temple, I could hear everything that happened as the two cops trooped up the steps. First, the party fell silent. No one opened the door. There was a rush of movement to their porch, directly above ours. Their glass door slid open. There was a pause. It closed. The cops were banging on the other door, raising their voices. Someone finally let them in.

The usual interrogation ensued. A driver’s license was requested. Wrongdoing was denied. Then we heard a new denomination of thump, distant, yet identifiable. A patter of footsteps on shingles, echoing through crawlspaces and ventilation shafts – kids on the roof. A cop echoed my realization into his radio. Back-up officers materialized within seconds. They trained their spotlights through the Ponderosa pine branches. Cops were yelling come down off the roof. Then cops on the ground directed cops on the roof to fugitive clumps of teenagers. The under-aged were wrangled back into the apartment.

Through this drama, Paul and I had been snickering in mock-teetotaler delight while we sipped whiskey. But when we saw the first boy in handcuffs, we were not sure how to react. Then we saw the second, the third, and a fourth, each cuffed and escorted down the steps, each seated in a separate cruiser. We stared at each other, suddenly aware of what we’d caused, poignantly aware that we were not so different from those kids not too long ago, and speechlessly aware that a young Mormon couple would have made the same phone call.

Then we high-fived and got a great night’s sleep.

Later, I found their arrests in the newspaper’s police log. I made a photocopy, highlighted it, and handed it to the property manager. He evicted them. I dared to tell myself that Idaho Falls wouldn’t be so bad, after all. I hadn’t seen a hobo spider in days, and now the neighbors were history, and surely a job offer was one phone call away.

Idaho Fell (October 2005)

By October, my August and September applications were all for naught. I applied for the manager position at a thrift store run by a non-denominational Christian charity, at UPS, at an appraisal office, then the Nature Conservancy, a camera store, the new Borders Books opening directly across the street from the old Borders Books, the county courthouse as a victim/witness coordinator, and another temp agency. Nothing. With $100 left in my checking account, I had to change my job search strategy.

The time had come to lie.

At the end of October, a medical clinic in a neighboring town was hiring a receptionist. I sat down with my old friend the résumé and I made the appropriate changes.

I deleted my M.F.A. degree and everything associated with it.

In its place, to account for those three years spent teaching at the University of Idaho, I put English Department Assistant. What does a department assistant do? What does a clinic receptionist do? I wagered it was the same set of skills. I had never been an English Department Assistant. The position didn’t even exist. On my résumé I wrote that I had excellent phone skills and knew about conflict resolution skills, which, in total truth, I did know about, thanks to the Workplace Essentials class. I listed some professors as references and hoped the clinic didn’t contact them.

Within a day, I got a call. Could I come for an interview?

Two middle-aged women, also receptionists, interviewed me. I quickly spotted their wedding rings, and in photo on a desk, a bridal party outside the temple. I couldn’t lie and say I was Mormom; they had a vast registry, every name and surname and relation, all the way back to Joseph Smith. So I added this fiction – that I was married and had worked as a department assistant to help put my husband through college. It was sacrilege, and I said it so easily.

Married and husband were the magic words, placeholders for the magic religious affiliation I could never fake. I charmed empathetic smiles out of the women interviewing me. I made sense to them.

They offered me the job the next day. Insurance benefits, retirement package, $9 an hour, vacation hours to start accumulating immediately. I took it.

I thought my spine would dissolve under the irony of it all. A god of ethics was going to rain a plague of hobo spiders for this trespass.

They loved that I had conflict resolution skills. If only they knew that I’d started thinking of southeast Idaho as conflict, and of manipulation as resolution.

Not long after, one solid night of freezing temperatures killed off that year’s spider population, and I prayed a rare and private thank-you to the force of nature. With any luck, I’d be far from Idaho Falls by next summer, when their stashed egg sacks would hatch, renewing the infestation. Elated that all the outside hobos were now dead (I’m glad your hearts froze), I conducted a search and destroy mission with the handheld vacuum. Under the couch, under the dresser, behind the chair, under the oven (their favorite spot, for the residual warmth).

Paul watched my mission with amusement and suggested we buy traps, just in case. We went to the grocery store and stood at the checkout, where bright yellow boxes of specially-designed hobo traps took precedent over candy. The traps were sheets of hobo-scented sticky paper. The spiders would run to the scent and blunder onto the gluey sheets, lost in the lust of pheromones. But I couldn’t bring myself to buy them. I was afraid that even with my thorough cleaning, the traps would be full of hobos within hours. I couldn’t live with the idea that there were many poisonous spiders hiding in my apartment. It would be better not to know how many there really were.

Paul disagreed with my rationalizing. “You’re sympathizing with them,” he said, “because you don’t want to get stuck either.”

Idaho Fallen (in four verses)

I.

One week into my new job as a receptionist at the medical clinic, three of my earlier and honest applications got noticed. The editor at the newspaper left me a downright jolly message, assuring me that I was his top pick for the weekend obituary position, and just when could I come in for an interview? Same with the thrift store. And the mail-order beauty products place left two messages, because obviously someone with a master’s degree in English ought to be interviewed for a copywriter position. I swore at the answering machine the way I had cursed at the hobo spider in the bathtub. I’d just completed a week of intense training at the clinic, and backing out would leave my new coworkers, who were unexpectedly friendly, in an awful spot. They didn’t deserve that. I couldn’t quit, and on a deeper level, I knew I couldn’t go back to the self on those honest applications.

II.

The property manager got fired after the holidays. A fair housing authority had received sufficient complaints about sexual harassment, but they had also found out Smith was charging a pet deposit for service animals. It was a violation of an obscure part of the ADA. This was what ultimately got him canned, according to a memo from the new property manager, an upbeat guy named Jerry who had refunded pet deposits and was promising to throw a community barbecue come summer. Paul and I looked at each other and could only shrug.

III.

After the upstairs boys were evicted, a tiny woman moved in. Paul and I watched her from between the blinds, and we argued about the characteristics of dwarfs versus midgets. She was barely four feet tall, but not disproportioned; we concluded she was a midget. She compensated with high-heeled boots, so the mysterious thumping of the boys was replaced by the hollow clack and rap of her fashion. She drove a bright yellow VW bug whose alarm system activated every time she started the engine. We could have found these noises just as intrusive as the kitchen-wrestling of the boys, but I think we must have found her harmless because she was small.

IV.

Paul and I left Idaho Falls the next summer. We’d both been hired at a community college in Pennsylvania. The technical college wanted to rehire him, but only part time, and I got along fine with my coworkers at the clinic, but after half a year it had become a monotonous, dead-end job, and the reality of being a career receptionist with a candy jar and whimsical doo-dads on the desk made me shiver in self-revulsion. Paul liked the technical college well enough, but his Mormon students called paragraphs verses, and it bothered him. A move across the country would be expensive, and the cost of living would increase, but we banked on the benefits of putting 2,500 miles between us and the decisions of Idaho Falls.

On our final day in town, we emptied our Shadow Canyon apartment and cleaned it spotless because we needed every dollar of our security deposit. In the corner of the utility closet, behind the water heater, I found one dead hobo spider, on its back, long legs wrapped over the belly like a ribbon on a present. I considered it for a moment. Spiders who try to over-winter in the house don’t need much food, but they need warmth and water. It had opted for warmth instead of water, for the closet instead of the bathroom, ironically dying within inches of a water tank, which was (ironically) the thing that was providing the warmth.

For a minute, I felt bad for the spider, done in by the illogic of the world. Then I swept it into the dust pan and dropped it in the last bag of trash.

I have often seen youth as the lyrical age, that is the age when the individual, focused almost exclusively on himself, is unable to see, to comprehend, to judge clearly the world around him… then to pass from immaturity to maturity is to move beyond the lyrical attitude. [Milan Kundera, The Curtain]

I search for meaning everywhere as I try to understand what is happening in my country, Kenya. Lyrical implies something beautiful, pure, good, even. Does it speak for the stage of being that Kenya has gone through, or does it speak for me as an individual, or can I even separate my country from myself as our birthdays are less than a week apart? Are we passing from immaturity to maturity; a chrysalis that has been violently ripped apart by a post-election result that went so terribly wrong?

Choosing a leader

December 27, 2007 polling day. Kenyans lined up in unprecedented numbers across the country to cast their vote. Patiently waiting, some silent, some chatting conversationally to whomever shared their alphabetically grouped name chronology; Kenyans appeared united in their quest for a peaceful election.

The polling stations were to open at 6am. I left my house at 6:30 in the morning; mineral water, windbreaker and a foldable chair at the ready. The morning was unusually cool for Kenya at the height of its summer season and the low-hanging clouds threatened rain. The polling station was at a local government school in an upmarket residential part of Nairobi, a brisk fifteen minute walk from my house. I drove there…just in case.

There were cars parked, back to back on the grassy kerbsides on all the byroads close to the school. I managed to squeeze my 1969 VW beetle into a spot, not too far from the main road. I grabbed my tote bag with its book, chair, water and sun visor: in case it turned out to be a long wait.

The queues, when I got to the main road near the school gate, went for about a kilometre and disappeared round the block, with no end in site. Daunted, I retreated to my car. On the way, I met a young man dressed in a white turtle neck, trendy jeans and sporting tinted designer glasses his face framed with fashionably close-cropped jet black hair. I asked him if he had already voted and he responded in an Americanised accent that he too had taken one look at the very long queues and decided to retrieve his international press pass and use it to jump to the front of the queue. I wasn’t so lucky.

Four hours later, I met up with a friend and together we went to cast our vote. The queues had disappeared, and it took us an easy half-hour to triumphantly complete the process. We spent the rest of the morning, in between coffee breaks, driving around to various polling stations to see firsthand how things were going across the city. We focused on the low income and high density areas, as these were usually the trouble spots, if there was to be trouble. We wanted to have our own account of what had happened and not have to rely on partial accounts of the situation.

Everywhere we went, there was calm. In the low-income areas, those who had already cast their vote were walking around their neighbourhoods, carrying about their normal business. The whole city felt easy like a Sunday morning, even though it was a weekday. There was the thrill of not having to battle with the soul-destroying Nairobi traffic that we all had to contend with on a daily basis. Most people appeared to have been within walking distance from their polling station, or like for me, a short neighbourhood drive. The roads were clear of traffic and I was able to joyfully careen down the highways at unchecked speeds.

That evening, we sat with family and friends listening to the tallying of the polls as they came in. Some people had friends who were part of the observer team, international and Kenyan, scattered around the county at hundreds of polling stations. Thus, in some cases we got sneak previews of the final tallies before they were carried by the press. It quickly emerged that there had been an unprecedented rejection of the ruling party. The majority of Ministers had been removed from their constituencies and a larger percentage of the parliamentary old guard cast aside; some by unknowns, political novices. The consistent message was that the main opposition party, the Orange Democratic Movement, led by Raila Odinga and his pentagon team, had received an overwhelming country-wide endorsement. It won 96 parliamentary seats to the PNU, government party’s 30-odd seats. Without the final results of the presidential election, it was to be a restless night. I went to bed around midnight having left the favoured opposition candidate with substantial lead of 800,000. It was estimated that there were to be about nine million voters. We had been made to understand that the majority of votes had already been tallied country-wide. I along with many other Kenyans woke up that Friday morning to hear that the opposition’s lead had been reduced overnight to a margin of less than 200,000 votes.

Over the next two days, Kenyans sat rapt, nervous, incredulous listening and watching whatever media they had available to them; flipping between TV channels and radio stations; double checking, cross-checking the incoming results against their handwritten scores of their print-out of candidate names provided by the local newspapers.

By Friday afternoon, the old president was said to be in the lead as late votes coming from his ethnically dominated province had overturned the lead of the opposition leader by about 200,000 votes. On Friday evening, the Electoral Commission of Kenya, ECK, stated that it would beannouncing the winner of the presidential election at 10am on Saturday morning as there were serious allegations of vote rigging and the tally process had to be verified overnight.

Ten o’clock came and went with no further information. Even now, tears spring to my eyes as I remember hearing later that afternoon, that the Chair of the ECK was going to announce the results of the winner of the presidential election from a secure room and that the only media body to be allowed inside that room would be the government owned, Kenya Broadcasting Corporation. Blackout.

Within an hour of the ECK announcement, the old president was sworn in as the new president from the heavily secured safety of State House, the president’s official residence. And, the country erupted into violence.

Two-ooohhhh-two

In 2002, European friends, proud to have been in Kenya during an election that showed the world that Kenya was finally a democratic nation, begged me to accompany them to Uhuru Park, where the President was to be inaugurated. My 8-month pregnant friend, determined not to miss this historical event, wobbled down the 2 kilometres from my then apartment to the park. Kenyans were hanging out of balconies and windows of government buildings that surround the park. I saw women dressed in skirts and heels, scaling the walls of high-rise buildings, fear no longer a factor in their quest to be part of a ceremony that all Kenyans were able to hold up their heads in pride about.

As the previous president, Daniel Arap Moi, who had ruled the country for 24 miserable years arrived, jeers erupted across the crowd. Kenyans wanted to block his entry but were gently persuaded by the minimally present security forces, to let him pass; after all, he had to hand over power to the then newly elected president, Mwai Kibaki.

Kenya made history twice: once for peacefully and overwhelming rejecting the old guard; and secondly for inaugurating a president in a wheel chair. Kibaki had suffered a car accident that had left him in a wheel chair three weeks before the December 2002 polls. At that point, we did not know if he would ever walk again. We were almost proud to have a physically disabled president.

It was estimated that over a million ecstatic Kenyans were in the park that day to watch the inauguration of a president whose fortunes had changed when his then compatriot and now opposition leader, Raila Odinga, stated the two most important words of the then divided opposition campaign: Kibaki Tosha! Tosha, Enough, was the Swahili word that Raila chose to tell Kenyans that Kibaki sufficed; and that he Raila, a Luo, was giving us permission to go ahead and vote for Kibaki, a Kikuyu, as our president. Kenyans obeyed, no matter their ethnic background.

Uhuru, the word for freedom in Kiswahili, is the name of a park in the centre of the city where ordinary Kenyans lie down to rest during lunch breaks; where they come on the weekends with their families, some to sail in the almost toy like boats on the big pond at the park’s centre; where as little children we used to roll down the steep, and then grassy, incline to the road that snakes its way across the park in front of the bandstand. Historically, Uhuru park was always used for all momentous national events: except the 2008 swearing-in of the disputed president.

Crisis Kenya

Last week, my office decided to walk down as a group, to Uhuru park. This was to be part of a process of healing, peace building and forging unity amongst Kenyan employees whose different ethnic communities have been ripped apart by the violence unleashed countrywide, following the flawed election process. Each employee was to lay down a single rose at the memorial for the more than 800 Kenyans who have died as a direct result of the violence.

As we walked towards the entrance to the park, we noticed that there were security forces manning an informal stone barrier and blocking entry to the park. We approached the barrier, one by one, the lounging officers got up, AK-47 guns in hand and came to meet us at the barrier. I was glad to see that they were not the previously feared, now caricatured, General Services Unit, GSU, who in their spanking new, army green uniforms, including bulky padding, clear plastic romanesque shields and Sergeant Beetle helmets, have been nick-named the Adult Ninja Turtles.

We were a group of about 30 women and men of mixed race and mixed ethnicity. The leader of the para-military forces was called from where he was lounging further up the hill that I used to roll down as a child. The officers were all very polite, even friendly. Our office head explained that we wanted to cross the park to lay flowers at Freedom Corner where the memorial had been designated earlier that week. The leader of the para-military forces at the barrier patiently explained to us that the memorial was at the farthest end of the park and that we would need to walk around the perimeter of the park, about 2 extra kilometres, in order to get to the entrance by the memorial as the park was off-limits to the public; for security reasons.

We acquiesced and took the non-scenic route, inhaling diesel fumes from the city buses chugging their way up the hill that encircles the western face of the park. We trudged down dusty sidewalks, along with the city’s walking masses and eventually reached the authorised entrance. We’d picked up some ordinary Kenyans along the way who had asked us if they too could share our flowers and come with us to lay them down at the memorial. Seeing all those masses of withering flowers their vibrant colours and beauty dissipated, handwritten notes with messages of peace, forgiveness, goodbyes, pulled my irretrievably back to another continent, another time. As I looked at the wilting flowers, laid my own fresh roses down and read the notes, I had the eerie sense of being transported back to September 2001. It was a few days after the horror of 9/11, when the world was forever changed. I had gone down to the site of the Twin Towers where I laid down a bouquet in memory of those who had died. The next day I left New York for Nairobi never thinking that I would be experiencing that same sense of tragic loss, seven years later in my own country, where the recent continuing political crisis has forever changed the Kenya that we know and love.

How did we get to a place where the whole world watches a Kenya, renowned for its gentle, friendly peoples; beautiful fine, white-sand beaches and cool ocean breezes; incomparable national parks; stunning vistas and a modern, tree-lined capital whose closeness to the equator has temperatures tempered by an altitude 5,500 feet above sea level that on a hot sunny day feels almost cold under the shade of a tree; self-destructing, with machete wielding youths; burning houses, destroyed railway lines; barricaded highways; an economic cataclysm?

On December 30, 2007, the BBC reported under its breaking news that Raila Odinga, the leader of the opposition ODM party, was declaring himself the winner, the People’s President, and would be holding an inauguration on the following day at Uhuru park and had asked Kenyans to reject the presidential decision. A sort of cat and mouse game thus begun with the People’s President periodically calling for mass protests and the government banning all public gatherings of people. In the early days of the crisis, what appeared to be hundreds of security personnel were said to be encircling the park. Now, the park remains closed off with groups of armed para-militaries scattered strategically all across the park.

Every time a mass protest was called or threatened, offices and businesses closed, work was disrupted with managers and owners fearing for the safety of their staff. The government forces would throw tear-gas canisters at crowds and fire live bullets. Palm-waving youth responded with stones and sticks. We huddled in our gated and fenced homes, afraid to go out in case we were caught in the fracas. On one day, all roads to the city centre were barricaded by government forces to ensure that the mass rally would not and could not take place. Meanwhile, the official government spokesman was telling the world that there was no crisis in the country; just some isolated skirmishes in certain parts of the country. Circulated sms-es told of an impending food crisis. Upmarket supermarkets were being raided as middle class families stocked up for food items. A friend photographed a grocery shop with the lines going out into and around the parking lot as Kenyans worried about where the country was heading. This only happened on a couple of occasions but for now, the shelves continue to be well stocked with higher priced basic foods and luxury items. In the lower income areas, shops have been destroyed and prices of basic food items have sky-rocketed when available. In some slum communities, men don’t sleep at night, waiting for marauding gangs of criminals taking advantage of the political crisis or fearing reprisal attacks by different ethnic groups. Questions about who are the real victims punctuate the public discourse.

Following the announced disputed results of the presidential election, messages of anger and despair hit the airwaves, and the mobile phone lines were abuzz with sms-es. Some were messages of hate and doom, of unprintable planned ethnic cleansings. There were threats that the government was going to clamp down on communication channels and Kenyans would no longer be able to send short text messages. The mobile phone companies resisted the government pressure. Instead, we started to receive various messages from 999, usually reserved for emergency services: The Government of Kenya advises that the sending of hate messages inciting violence is an offence that could result in prosecution.

In my continuing quest to understand what is happening in Kenya, last week, I listened to a BBC story on its correspondent in Beirut. She recounted a heart-rending story of the beginning of the decline of her country in the 1970s. She described a photo of two children playing in the foreground; behind them stood armed military personnel. It was a photo of childhood innocence in a city whose name became synonymous with total devastation. The two playing girls were her sisters, forever captured at a turning point in history. She tells of people asking them why they never left, her mother being European with family in her native land. She explains that it is because they always hoped that things would get better and recounts scenes during the thirty years since that photographed day. Young, fashionable Lebanese sitting in trendy cafés in downtown Beirut. In all likelihood, they are conversing in French, they are part of an international elite who are at home in any major city in the world. Life moves on it seems. People get married, people bring children into this world while others continue to die.

In Kenya, life moves on for me too. My friend’s aunt calls her from London telling her to leave Kenya immediately. She responds that we are sitting at a café drinking lattes with other friends at one of the popular restaurants scattered around the city; packed with locals and the international set. The night before, we had thrown a dinner party. On New Year’s Eve, we had determinedly put on our dancing shoes and party dresses and gone out to a private club where we found over two hundred guests with the same intentions. We were all determined to bring our lives back to normality, as quickly as possible. No political madness was going to turn us into victims of fear. Then there are days like last Tuesday, four weeks after the disputed inauguration when a newly elected MP from the opposition was murdered and rumours of unrest spread around the city. The police started closing off roads into and around the city. I was on my way to the office when I started getting the sms-es telling of unrest. I was devastated. Two weeks earlier, less than a kilometre from my house, the roads had been closed off and over twenty Adult Ninja Turtles were fanned our across the main artery leading to my office. I called in to work to say that I wouldn’t be in as I was afraid to drive in on roads that could, at any moment, turn into battle grounds between youths and the security forces. My office and several others closed around the city that day. I sat at home, sickened, unable to do any work; not even from the assumed safety of my home.

As Kenyans we fight for our voice to be heard above the world clamour of “…tribal fighting”, “…ethnic cleansing”, “…another Rwanda”, “…Ivory Coast”, or a hushed, “…Somalia?”. NO! is our resounding response, we are NONE OF THE ABOVE. We try to explain that as Kenyans we don’t have an in-built hatred for each other based on ethnicity; yes there are ethnic-related responses to situations; yes there are perceptions of ethnic superiority and; yes there have been ethnically inspired, economic resource allocations. But, we have lived together and hope that we will continue to live together in the future. What we want is to know that our vote counts; like it did in 2002. Not only must our vote count, it must be seen to count. We will not accept that fiasco that we, and the whole world, witnessed on that shame-filled late Saturday afternoon of December 29, 2007.

Several parks in Nairobi are now off-limits to Kenyans. Live media broadcasts were banned less than a week after the elections. The ban was finally lifted about 4 weeks later following pressure from the on-going internationally mediated political process. The humanitarian crisis, resulting in over 250,000 internally displaced persons in Kenya, is receiving United Nations appeals. One day, I looked across my garden with its myriad old trees in full bloom interspacing the gently undulating sea of green lawn. Through the kai-apple hedge, I saw a humanitarian assistance car pass by on the road outside my home. Their offices are down the road from where I live and so it was not unusual for their cars to drive up and down the road. However, they had their red flag with the white cross at full wind. I had never seen the flag displayed outside of a conflict zone. A place that I never thought Nairobi would be. And, there it was outside my own front garden.

But, within the chaos, lies hope. There is a Kofi Annan led mediation process that Kenyans are banking their hopes on. Civil society groups all over Kenya are trying to come up with solutions. Kenyans are generously giving support for the humanitarian crisis and volunteering time. Friends working with international organisations have either refused to leave Kenya or have returned to Kenya amidst the chaos in a display of hope and solidarity with Kenyans. Last week a friend sent me a short text message about a family from the Luo ethnic community protecting the homestead of a Kikuyu family in a province in the West of Kenya. This area has suffered much of the violence that has taken place between the communities of the two leaders at the helm of the disputed election. The week before, I received another message from a friend about women in one of the slum communities of Nairobi that have come together, bringing together all the various ethnic groups, and taking a stance against violence within their particular part of the slum.

While the message of peace is important, justice must be seen to be part of the process in order to ensure lasting peace. It is clear that as individuals we each have a part to play, no matter how small that part is, in ensuring that our country achieves economic, social and political democracy. This is beyond the ability of our elected leaders to do on their own.