MAN GONE DOWN
By Michael Thomas.
431 pp. Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic. Paper, $14.
February 5, 2007
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- Blast Levels Baghdad Market
Karim Kadim/Associated PressA man was taken to a hospital Saturday after he was wounded in the bombing of a popular Baghdad market.
At Least 130 Die as Blast Levels Baghdad Market
BAGHDAD, Sunday, Feb. 4 — A mammoth truck bomb obliterated a popular central Baghdad market on Saturday, ripping through scores of shops and flattening apartment buildings, killing at least 130 people and wounding more than 300 in the worst of a series of horrific attacks against Shiites in recent weeks.
The attack was the work of a suicide bomber who detonated about one ton of explosives in the bustling Sadriya market, in a largely Shiite enclave at 5 p.m., as shoppers finished buying food for dinner and men sipped coffee at cafes nearby, the police said. It was the deadliest single bomb blast since the United States invasion almost four years ago.
The bombing, the fourth major attack against a densely populated Shiite area in less than three weeks, seemed sure to inflame Shiite political and militia leaders just as more than 20,000 American troops begin to arrive in an attempt to stop the civil war that threatens to tear Iraq apart.
The unrelenting killing of Shiites also promises to put more pressure on Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who finds himself squeezed between American demands to crack down on Shiite militias and his fellow Shiites’ increasing belief that the militias are their best defense against Sunni insurgents.
American commanders say that in recent weeks, as Mr. Maliki has tried to show he is supporting the current plan to secure Baghdad, top Shiite government officials have meddled less in the Americans’ efforts to pursue militia leaders.
But Shiite community leaders say that as a result, they are now more exposed to Sunni insurgent attacks. And some Shiite militia commanders acknowledge that they have reduced militia checkpoints to avoid confrontation with American forces.
Within hours of the bombing, Mr. Maliki denounced the attack as the work of “Saddamists” and other Sunni insurgents.
The chaotic scene after the blast suggested how much pressure Shiite political leaders would face to seek revenge against Sunnis for the recent attacks: as onlookers cursed the Iraqi government for not protecting them from Sunni militants, Shiite militiamen descended on the area, angrily questioning people they believed did not belong in the neighborhood.
The bomber struck close to the middle of the narrow market, which stretches for about an eighth of a mile, killing everyone nearby and dozens more in collapsed apartment buildings and coffeehouses that line the market, witnesses said.
“Look at all these buildings,” shouted Qadir Ali Ismael, a 41-year-old vegetable seller who escaped the blast. “There were families living in these apartments and they didn’t find anyone alive in there. All of those people were killed!”
The attack left a crater 15 feet long, 10 feet wide and 5 feet deep. Blast waves left buildings a block away badly damaged.
Police officers rushed frantically to rescue wounded people trapped inside buildings, only to find that they could not break through damaged doors to get inside. By the time they did, some of the wounded had bled to death, said Abu Ali, who runs a health clinic a few blocks from the market.
“The doors wouldn’t open,” he said. “The rescuers are getting there too late.” He said he treated more than 40 people himself, mostly children and women, and quickly ran out of first-aid supplies.
As the loudspeaker of a nearby Shiite mosque called for people to donate blood, American Humvees took up positions on a street that leads to a nearby Sunni neighborhood, apparently in an effort to prevent clashes between the sects.
Anger spread through the crowd that gathered at the blast site as people said that the attack was the work of Sunni insurgents. Although no group claimed responsibility by early morning Sunday, suspicion fell on Sunni militants, who have conducted large-scale suicide bombings in the past.
One elderly man, crying and shouting, was surrounded by younger men.
“They tried to kill us because we are Shia,” the older man said. “Why are there no bombs in Adhamiya?,” he said, referring to a large Sunni district of Baghdad. “Maliki and the Americans are the sons of dogs because they do nothing to protect us.”
Grieving relatives rushed to hospitals. At the Imam Ali Hospital in the Sadr City neighborhood, the refrigerated portion of the morgue quickly filled and bodies were piled up next to it. People tried to donate blood, but were told to go to a blood bank that is in a dangerous area of Baghdad.
The American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, condemned the attack as an “example of what the forces of evil will do to intimidate the Iraqi people.” And the White House called the bombing an atrocity, saying, “Free nations of the world must not stand by while terrorists commit mass murder in an attempt to derail democratic progress in Iraq and throughout the greater Middle East.”
Several Sunni neighborhoods came under retaliatory attack Saturday night. A Western official said Adhamiya was struck by several mortars, and an Interior Ministry official said another Sunni neighborhood in eastern Baghdad, Slaykh, was also hit by at least three mortar rounds.
The death toll on Saturday eclipsed the number in September 2005 attack in a Shiite area of Baghdad and one in the February 2005 bombing of a Hilla market, each of which killed at least 120 people. The largest overall attack remains a series of bombs that killed about 200 people in Sadr City last November.
With Saturday’s bombing, more than 400 people have been killed in about a half-dozen bomb attacks on Shiite areas in Baghdad and Hilla in just the past three weeks. The Sadriya market was also hit by two large bombs in early December.
Saturday’s attack came as both the Iraqi and United States governments have committed to yet another attempt to quell sectarian violence in Baghdad. Many Democrats and some Republicans have assailed the White House for its decision to send extra troops.
The United States Senate is most likely to vote soon on a nonbinding resolution opposing the troop buildup.
Earlier on Saturday, Iraq’s most revered Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, repeated his call for Muslims to “stand together and repel division and reject sectarian rifts,” and he denounced those who he said were “deepening the sectarian disputes between the Muslims.”
The calamity in Baghdad came after a bloody day throughout the rest of Iraq that included a coordinated volley of seven car bombs in Kirkuk, apparently the latest strike by insurgents seeking to thwart Kurdish efforts to fully annex the disputed oil-rich city.
The first Kirkuk suicide attacker detonated his bomb-laden Toyota near the offices of the powerful Kurdistan Democratic Party at about 10:30 a.m., killing one civilian and wounding 17 others while damaging 10 nearby houses, according to Burhan Habib Tayeb, a senior police officer in Kirkuk. Other reports placed the casualty toll at 2 dead and 30 wounded.
The next four car bombs were detonated about every 10 minutes, beginning at 11 a.m. One wounded two students at a school for girls and another wounded four people at a gas station. Two more bombs went off later in the day, wounding two civilians, said a Kirkuk police captain, Emad Jasim.
Gunmen fatally struck Iraqi forces twice in Samarra, north of Baghdad, where the destruction of a Shiite shrine last February set off a wave of sectarian violence. Gunmen struck a police checkpoint north of the city about 7:30 a.m., killing six policemen and wounding six more, a police official said. Four Iraqi soldiers were later killed just south of the city after gunmen attacked their checkpoint. Three other soldiers were wounded, and three of the gunmen were killed, the police official said.
The Iraqi police also battled insurgents in a neighborhood of western Mosul on Saturday, while a large bomb wounded three policemen in another part of western Mosul, a police official said. Several insurgents were killed in the gun battle, but no policemen died, he said.
Iraqi forces imposed a curfew in Kirkuk, Mosul and Samarra following the violence.
The American military on Saturday reported the deaths of six more servicemen. Two soldiers assigned to units in insurgent-dominated Anbar Province in western Iraq died Friday from “wounds sustained due to enemy action,” the American military announced. The names and specific units were not released.
Two other soldiers based near Baghdad were killed when a roadside bomb struck their patrol south of the capital on Friday.
A soldier from the 13th Sustainment Command (Expeditionary) died from an apparent heart attack after physical training on Friday, while another from the same command died Jan. 30 from “noncombat-related causes” during a two-week leave, the military said.
Reporting was contributed by Marc Santora, James Glanz, Khalid al-Ansary, Khalid W. Hassan, Ali Adeeb and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times.
- What I learned from Molly Ivins.
Funny Woman
What I learned from Molly Ivins.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Friday, Feb. 2, 2007, at 6:57 PM E.T.I didn’t know Molly Ivins, and most of you didn’t, either. But there was something about her voice—brash and bossy and warm—that made it easy to feel that we really did know her; she just hadn’t met us yet.
As both a woman and a writer, I cannot actually remember a time before Molly Ivins. And as someone who suspects that funny women writers can get away with things serious women writers cannot, it seems to me that every little girl in America should be forced to read an Ivins essay along with her American Girl and Traveling Pants collections.
Ivins, who died this week, was an unrepentant midcentury liberal, a rabble rouser, and a populist. She hated phonies and D.C. insiders and bemoaned the demise of independent journalism, writing: “If you are a younger journalist … how are you to know that there’s another way to do it? A whole different tradition? That success is not becoming a talking head celebrity, saying what everyone else says?” But above all, Ivins was funny. Stuff-out-your-nose, choke-on-your-muffin funny. And that fact alone should warrant a parade.
Christopher Hitchens’ recent musing on women and funniness will be treated here with all the seriousness it warrants.
That should about do it.
Ivins’ bag of comedic tricks included the perfect metaphor: “Being Canadian” was “like living next door to the Simpsons”; being “attacked by Rush Limbaugh on the air” was like “being gummed by a newt. It doesn’t actually hurt but it leaves you with slimy stuff on your ankle.” She also nailed the genius turn of phrase: “Iraq is clearly hubris carried to the point of insanity—it’s damn hard to convince people you’re killing them for their own good.” (Ivins famously ended her career with the New York Times when she referred to a “community chicken-killing festival” in a small town as a “gang-pluck.”)
But her greatest gift as a humorist was her ability to put into words something everyone vaguely sensed but hadn’t yet named. She brilliantly dubbed George W. Bush “Shrub.” She relentlessly debunked the stupidism that “we can make ourselves safer if we just make ourselves less free.” And she could vanquish a widely held misconception with a well-placed “poot” or “piffle.” Of those who urged that “anyone speaking up for civil liberties is on the side of the terrorists,” she wrote, “that’s the kind of thinking that has earned syllogism the reputation it enjoys today.” Of the lingering outrage aimed at Hillary Clinton: “Most people have a very hard time forgiving those whom they have deeply wronged.”
Ivins once described her job as “to provide regular instruction in the science of how to keep laughing, even though you’ve considered all the facts,” and that command of the facts is what made her humor matter. Ivins wasn’t the one in the girls’ bathroom cracking on how tacky the other girls’ blazers were. That seems to me where women’s humor goes off the rails, whether it’s perpetrated by men or by women. No, she found a way to tell dirty jokes with the boys instead. She joked about budgets and arms deals and she used the word “balls.” She might have been scared, but she never let on.
Of her friend and hero Jessica Mitford, Ivins wrote: “[She] was not fearless. She was brave.” Ivins knew the difference. She once said her greatest compliment came from a Texas legislator who told her, in all sincerity, “Young lady. You got huevos.” And in Ivins’ view huevos means overcoming that fear and standing up for those without money, or power, or influence. It’s quite a trick to make single mothers or crumbling middle schools funny, but Ivins did it. And that’s why she loathed Limbaugh. Not because he wasn’t funny, and not because he preferred different politicians. But because targeting “dead people, little girls and the homeless” is cheap and cruel. Fair or not, Ivins had a humor code and by her law, satire “was a weapon of powerless people aimed at the powerful.” Reversing that order isn’t bravery. Ivins could be brutal when she went after the corrupt and the powerful: She lashed back at the media love fest over Richard Nixon when he died with one of the most blistering pieces she ever penned. But she saw that wit as a means to an end.
Ivins didn’t land every joke, but who does? And she wasn’t right in every instance, but who is? (Ivins wrote confidently in 1992 that “as we all get to know [Hillary Clinton] I suspect much of the controversy will die away.”) She was right about the big stuff. In 1992 she also wrote that the defining moment for her generation was “not whether you went to Vietnam or whether you didn’t … the only question is whether we can find a president smart enough never to make a mistake like that again.”
But she did more than that. Molly Ivins taught a whole generation of women writers the most useful trick out there, more useful, even, than faking bravery: Get the boys to laugh with you, and you stand a pretty decent chance of being taken seriously.
Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.
- Bush Iraq Strategy
Even Plan’s Authors Say Political, Economic Changes May Fail
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 4, 2007; A16The success of the Bush administration’s new Iraq strategy depends on a series of rapid and dramatic political and economic reforms that even the plan’s authors have little confidence will work.
In the current go-for-broke atmosphere, administration officials say they are aware that failure to achieve the reforms would result in a repeat of last year’s unsuccessful Baghdad offensive, when efforts to consolidate military gains with lasting stability on the ground did not work. This time, they acknowledge, there will be no second chance.
Among many deep uncertainties are whether Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is up to the task and committed to spearheading what the administration foresees as a fundamental realignment of Iraqi politics; whether Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government and its sluggish financial bureaucracy will part with $10 billion for rapid job creation and reconstruction, at least some of it directed to sectarian opponents; and whether the U.S. military and State Department can calibrate their own stepped-up reconstruction assistance to push for action without once again taking over.
A pessimistic new National Intelligence Estimate released Friday described the Iraqi government as “hard-pressed” to achieve sectarian reconciliation, even in the unlikely event that violence diminishes. Without directly mentioning Maliki, it noted that “the absence of unifying leaders among the Arab Sunni or Shia with the capacity to speak for or exert control over their confessional groups limits prospects.”
Several senior officials involved in formulating the political and economic aspects of the administration’s strategy, along with a number of informed outsiders, agreed to discuss its assumptions and risks on the condition that they not be identified by name. Other sources refused to be even anonymously quoted, describing the administration as standing on the brink of an intricate combination of maneuvers whose outcome is far from assured.
The foundation of the strategy is not new — U.S. policy since the March 2003 invasion has been to use American military might, money and know-how to foster a peaceful Iraq with a unified government and a solid economy. The strategy incorporates major elements of last year’s “clear, hold and build” plan, whose “hold and build” parts never got off the ground.
Several sources expressed concern that the administration, by publicly rejecting a “containment” option — withdrawing U.S. troops to Iraqi borders to avoid sectarian fighting while preventing outside arms and personnel from entering the country — has not left itself a fall-back plan in the event of failure.
Shift in Political ClimateThe strategy’s political component centers on replacing deepening Sunni-Shiite-Kurdish divides with a new delineation between “extremists” and “moderates.” Moderates are defined as those of all religious and political persuasions who eschew violence in favor of safety and employment.
With the help of outside Iraq experts, the administration has compiled lists of active and still-untapped moderates around the country. “They wondered could I give them some [names] from the provinces or anywhere” from which to construct a new political base, recalled one think-tank expert called to the State Department in December. According to the intelligence estimate, however, Iraq’s reservoir of such people, especially trained technocrats and entrepreneurs, has been drained as they have fled the country in droves.
As American and Iraqi combat forces focus on cooling the cauldron of violence in Baghdad, U.S. military commanders and State Department teams plan to funnel “bridge money” toward moderate designees in outer provinces and in the capital to create jobs, start businesses and revitalize moribund factories. Iraqi money would come in behind to make it all permanent.
Iraqis with physical and economic security, the thinking goes, will give their political support to the government that produces both. Closing the circle, the Iraqi government will see non-sectarian moderates as the central support for a new political coalition.
As they put the plan together, officials held heated internal debates over whether Maliki was the right man to head such an effort. Some argued in favor of engineering a new Iraqi government under Maliki’s Shiite coalition partner, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and Hakim’s political stalking horse, Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi.
They closely examined the makeup of Iraq’s 275-seat parliament, where a no-confidence vote requires only a simple majority. Maliki’s Dawa party is part of the Hakim-led United Iraqi Alliance, the largest Shiite group, with 130 seats. Making a strong case for SCIRI, some argued that the Iraqis themselves were so fed up with Maliki that a different governing coalition is possible with realigned Sunni and Kurdish elements. This view found proponents in the White House and Pentagon, and it extended into parts of the normally more cautious State Department.
Maliki, whose Dawa party holds 12 seats in the parliament, was seen as unwilling to separate voluntarily from his existing power base — dominated by the violent and unruly Baghdad-based Jaish al-Mahdi militia, also known as the Mahdi Army, of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. With a new coalition, the Alliance would not need Sadr’s 30 seats.
SCIRI’s own militia, the Badr Organization, is seen as more cohesive, “an actual organization with command and control” that might be integrated into the Iraqi military, said one State Department official. The administration has charged that both the Sadr and Badr militias receive assistance from Iran. But officials regularly note that Badr forces have not attacked the U.S. military and that SCIRI has voiced equal opposition to Iranian and U.S. domination.
Other officials find that view naive, noting that evidence of Iran’s involvement in Iraqi violence was found in a SCIRI compound during a raid last month.
Several officials said they believe that Hakim’s backers in the Bush administration have been seduced by his forceful demeanor and Abdul Mahdi’s fluent English. And while many emphasized the importance of a single, visible Iraqi leader, others have said it is a mistake to personalize the policy in one Shiite actor.
After extensive discussions last month with Maliki, Hakim and Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, the most senior Sunni in the Iraqi government, policymakers decided to place their bets on Maliki. “We judge that Maliki does not wish to fail in his role,” National Intelligence Council Chairman Thomas Fingar told Congress in a tepid endorsement recently. “He has some, but not all, of the obvious requirements for success.”
In any case, replacing Maliki was determined to be “too hard,” in the words of one analyst. A two-thirds parliamentary majority is required to install a new prime minister, and any attempt to remove Maliki by parliamentary maneuver, it was agreed, should remain a Plan B that Iraqis themselves would undertake if he failed to produce results.
So far, Maliki has said the right things about cracking down on the sectarian violence — including by Sadr’s militia — that is tearing Baghdad apart. But there are worrisome signs. A parliamentary session late last month in which Maliki introduced the new plan was adjourned after it erupted in sectarian squabbling in which the prime minister gave as good as he got.
Many experts believe that the administration’s effort to build a new political center, supported by “moderate” Sunni allies in the region that fear Shiite Iranian expansion, such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, is hopelessly outdated. “Our struggle may be between moderates and extremists,” Brookings Institution scholar Martin Indyk said last month. “Their struggle is between Sunnis and Shias.”
New Economic InitiativesOn the economic front, where the United States has already invested more than $38 billion, the administration has asked for $538 million to keep current programs running and has proposed an additional $1.2 billion for new initiatives that it says will receive long-term Iraqi funding.
A combination of violent attacks on previous projects, sectarian favors, inefficient and overly cautious officials, and a complex bureaucracy — much of it installed by the United States under the post-invasion Coalition Provisional Authority — has left the Iraqi government with a significant capital surplus in each of the past several years.
Getting approval for reconstruction expenditures in the past, observed one U.S. official, has been like “pushing wet spaghetti.” The surplus, which is kept in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, now totals $12.5 billion. Maliki has publicly agreed to spend $10 billion of it on reconstruction and jobs.
The State Department has sent new “tiger teams” to six Iraqi ministries to help clear away the wreckage of the past and speed financing for approved projects, and it plans to double to 20 the number of U.S.-staffed provisional reconstruction teams in Baghdad and around the country.
In addition to Foreign Service officers, experts including small-business advisers and camel veterinarians are being recruited from the U.S. Agriculture Department and elsewhere to staff the teams, the State Department’s Iraq coordinator, David Satterfield, told Congress last week.
Former Foreign Service officer Timothy M. Carney, who worked in Iraq in 2003, has been appointed to coordinate the U.S. and Iraqi bureaucracies, to get the Iraqi government’s money moving and to make sure that Iraqi funding priorities coincide with the administration’s.
But some officials worry that the expanded U.S. presence will repeat the mistakes of the past — when the United States oversaw virtually every part of the Iraqi government — and undermine the goal of turning the country over to the Iraqis themselves.
“It’s the same old problem as in 2003,” cautioned one official. “The same impatience that if they can’t do it we’ll step in and do it. There is a bit of that creeping into this dialogue.”
Staff writers Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Michael Abramowitz contributed to this report.
- This is an amazing vignette.
What do you think ? Do you like it, does it strike a chord somewhere.?
My most immediate reaction is that the author has an incredible strength and courage to expose his inner thoughts and motivations. I admire this immensely, and I can honestly say that I am no way near the point where I would be comfortable to reveal myself to millions of strangers in such a way. And even at that I consider myself to be a rather open person, but in comparison to this author, I am a hermit with my thoughts and emotions.
With Love and Thoughts,
Michael
Modern LoveShe Handed Me a Cup From the Fountain of Youth
WHEN I turned 50, my girlfriend took me to dinner at one of those places where all the vegetables are “baby,” if not prenatal, and the waiters aren’t much older. My son and my brother joined us, making it an intimate gathering of all the people I love.
I was miserable. This was it? Where were the balloons, the band, the this-is-your-life surprise guests? What does one have to do for a little extra attention? I mean, I had successfully navigated five decades. If I were a 50-year-old bridge or a decommissioned aircraft carrier, there’d be fireworks. I wasn’t proud of it, but I wanted more.
A week later, I’m in a bar down near Bowery with Jonelle. She’s 30 or 29 or 32. Something pretty young. My girlfriend and I met her recently at a party given by a mutual acquaintance, and we hit it off. Since then the three of us have gotten together for a couple of getting-to-know-you dinners and the occasional movie with other friends. Earlier in the day, Jonelle e-mailed us about a downtown gallery opening. It was exhibiting guitars and guitar art: vintage guitars, custom guitars, historically important guitars, which had been set afire and urinated on. Jonelle thought it would be right up my alley.
My girlfriend was expecting a late night at work and couldn’t make it. But I was free, so I e-mailed back, “great. love to go. thanks! andy xo.” (I’m not much of a hugger in person, but for some reason I “xo” everybody.)
The opening is at 8:30 so Jonelle and I plan on a quick drink at 8. She picks the bar, Great Jones Cafe. Thin and pale as a bean sprout, Jonelle is awkwardly cute, a cross between Olive Oyl and Emma Peel from “The Avengers.” Her spaghetti-strap white top is tied with a tiny pink bow at the neckline, as if she were gift-wrapped. People probably think she’s my daughter.
On the day I turned 50, I shaved off my beard in a fit of Ponce de Leónian fountain-of-youth pathos. The experiment resulted in less gray hair but, more obviously, less hair. And now, because my skull is bald at both poles and tapers to a soft point like a hard-boiled egg standing on end, I’m stroking my chin with one hand while we talk. It looks as if I’m listening hard, but I’m hiding.
The conversation is light and not labor intensive, one of those comfortable back-and-forths during which it doesn’t much matter who says what. We’re two new friends putting each other at ease.
You like Alexander Calder? Me too. You play ukulele? I love ukulele — sort of. Nabokov? “Lolita” is so dark and hilarious. Grilled Swiss? Me too.
Until Jonelle pats the back of my hand and says, “How come all the guys I really get along with are either taken or gay?”
I freeze. Why does she think I’m gay? Oh, she means I’m taken. Right, I already have a girlfriend, a wonderful girlfriend I love and with whom I have lived for 13 years. She’s out there somewhere, working late, while I’m having drinks with Jonelle, who thinks that she and I “really get along.”
I’m flattered and unsure about how to respond. So I order another drink for myself. I don’t order one for Jonelle because now I’m afraid it might look predatory, even pedophilic, and — if people do think she’s my daughter — possibly incestuous. Or at the very least, pushy.
But she stops the bartender and says, “Hey, me too!” and orders herself a drink and tells me how great it is to be with a man she actually wants to be with, a man she could talk to all night. And I register that she didn’t say “somebody” she could talk to. She said “a man” she could talk to. Like maybe she noticed. I look in the mirror behind the bar, and I wonder if maybe, without my beard, I don’t look so much like her father.
When her cellphone buzzes and skitters on the bar like a silver scarab, she answers it, and I try not to eavesdrop. If it’s a man, I don’t want to know. Instead, I check my watch. It’s 8:45. The gallery opening started 15 minutes ago. Jonelle hangs up and I suggest we’d better go, but she says: “Oh, I’m having too much fun. Let’s have one more, O.K.?”
I’m worried it’s not O.K., but we order another round.
Soon we’re patting each other’s hands, and when her phone rings five or six more times, she ignores it. We start debating Outsider Art, which I know less than nothing about, but I once saw a movie about a mad shack-dweller who became an overnight sensation when SoHo discovered and then exploited him.
WHEN I tell her about this, she says, “Oh, don’t be so cynical,” and pokes me in the ribs, and I’m glad she picked the one unflabby stretch of my torso.
Pretty soon we’re punctuating our conversation with more gratuitous rib pokes and pats while she runs though a pros-and-cons checklist of the types of men she’s known and the types of men she’d like to know. And I can’t tell if she’s talking about them or, really, about me.
As we get more and more comfortable — so comfortable, in fact, that I’m uncomfortable — I realize she’s right: we’re having too much fun. So I mention it’s almost 10 o’clock. And she jumps and says, “Oh, my God, we better get over there.”
On the way she tries to hook her arm around mine, which I keep straight down at my side as if it’s paralyzed, so she’s forced to pinch my sleeve to hold on. But about halfway to the gallery I bend my elbow to support her, and she squeezes, and I squeeze back. It’s a friendly gesture. Women do it with each other all the time, right? And we stroll this way through the East Village.
Minutes later we stop at a loft building near Delancey Street. A retro-psychedelic guitar poster is taped to an unnumbered black door: “Sex Machines.” More identical posters line the wall along two flights up to the gallery. The stairs are dark, quiet, empty. Nobody is coming or going to this thing. Maybe it’s late and they’ve already gone, but because I’m a little drunk and because I know Jonelle lives downtown somewhere, and because she picked a bar right nearby, I begin to wonder if maybe this is her building and she’s taking me home.
But when we reach the right door and walk in, the place is packed with people.
And not only is it packed, but I know everybody — my girlfriend, my son, my brother, my nephews, people I work with, people I went to school with. And all of them yell, “Surprise!”
And everyone laughs and points at me, including Jonelle, who says, “Gotcha!” And kisses me.
On the cheek.
My girlfriend materializes from the sea of guests and we hug and kiss, and she giggles and says she picked Jonelle to get me here because she knew I wouldn’t turn down any invitation from her. It’s obvious I have a midlife crush. “It’s cute,” she says.
I hold onto her for dear life, and for balance. I’m staggered. My heart is bursting and breaking at the same time.
On the one hand, here is everyone I love — everyone who loves me. They did all this: the fake posters, my favorite music, balloons even. And the walls are covered with giant blowups of old family snapshots. Years’ worth. Generations’ worth. It’s a heart gallery.
On the other hand, Jonelle was playing with me at the bar, and I can’t tell for sure why I get weepy when my son appears and hugs me and whispers: “What happened? How come you’re so late? We thought you got lost.”
Maybe I did.
From him I find out that the first call Jonelle got, back at the bar, was my girlfriend telling her to stall, that they weren’t ready for me yet. Which, I suddenly understand, is the only reason Jonelle said she wanted to stay, that she was having too much fun, that she could talk to me all night. It was a trick.
A few minutes later I see my girlfriend talking to Jonelle in a corner, and she looks angry. So I thread my way over, shaking hands along the way, high-fiving, being hugged, hugging back.
When I’m close enough to listen in, I learn that the five or six other calls at the bar — the calls Jonelle ignored — were from my girlfriend, desperately trying to get back in touch. Jonelle was supposed to stall for 10 minutes, but she kept me there, and I let her keep me there, until we were half-drunk and almost two hours late to my surprise birthday party, with 75 people waiting.
IT was her job to deliver me, but instead she lingered at the bar, talking and poking, and when we finally left, she took my arm. So maybe she really did want to stay with me at the bar? Maybe she wasn’t just an agent? After all, two hours is a lot of make-believe. Perhaps she actually was having fun and truly wished I wasn’t taken?
Or maybe, like me, she was simply enjoying the extra attention. We could all use a little extra attention every now and then. Certainly at 50 we can. And maybe even at 30, 29 or 32. Nothing wrong with that. Is there?
But now Jonelle is getting the kind of attention from my angry girlfriend that nobody ever wants, and I can’t help standing back and watching. I already got my balloons and surprise guests. It appears, alas, that I may yet get my fireworks.
Andy Christie lives in New York City, where he is an owner of Slim Films and the curator of “The Liar Show,” a storytelling performance series.
- MAN GONE DOWN Michael Thomas Review
Angel Franco/The New York TimesMichael Thomas
American Dream Deferred
Call him Ishmael. It’s one of a few placeholders the protagonist of Michael Thomas’s first novel, “Man Gone Down,” offers up as a clue to his identity. It doesn’t matter if that’s really his name, though, because like Melville’s enlightened nonhero, this man does not expect to survive the journey. He has long known himself lost to this world.
Thomas gives him his story to tell in the first person, allowing his hero more than 400 pages to narrate the events of four days and the troubled lifetime that’s led up to them. A Boston-bred black man living in Brooklyn and struggling to write while supporting his blue-blooded white wife and their three children, Thomas’s narrator is on the verge of losing it all. Completely broke and temporarily residing in the bedroom of a friend’s child, he must come up with more than $12,000 in these four days — enough money to rent an apartment, pay tuition at his children’s private school and rescue his motley crew from their Brahmin grandmother’s New England home, where they’ve been exiled for the summer. “Man Gone Down” is the story of this and other near impossibilities.
Though the novel ostensibly recounts the events of four desperate days in New York, it extends far beyond these boundaries of time and space. In seamlessly integrated flashbacks, the narrator recalls the trauma of his 1970s childhood as a “social experiment,” bused to the affluent suburbs of Boston from the city. He then uses these forays into the too-present past as springboards from which to investigate the fragmented histories of his abusive mother and perpetually absent father — so much “collateral damage of the diaspora.” From there, flash forward to the tragedies of his more recent history: debilitating alcoholism, outbursts of violence while at Harvard, dreams deferred, if not extinguished altogether.
One of the bigger questions posed by the novel is how to pursue the American and other dreams when the realities of race stand so mightily in the way. Indeed, just how does one negotiate a color line that runs smack through the middle of a family? The narrator’s semi-ironic refrain, borrowed from Lorraine Hansberry, “Look what the new world hath wrought,” wears a bit thin, but his less self-conscious reflections on the so-called race question — as it affects his kids — are powerful and moving. Going a step beyond the normal parental fascination with their children’s genotype and phenotype, he acknowledges his heightened attention to the provenance of specific features: his younger son looks “exactly like” him “except he’s white. He has bright blue-gray eyes that at times fade to green. … In the summer he’s blond and bronze — colored. He looks like a tan elf on steroids.” Barely named products of his transgressive partnership (his sons are called “C” and “X,” his daughter referred to only as “my girl”), the children are preposterous hybrids — “the wreckage of miscegenation” — at war with a nation’s desired purity. His well-founded fears for them expose the lie of America’s melting-pot fantasy.
Here he is on his older son: “I thought, when he was born, that his eyes would be closed. I didn’t know if he’d be sleeping or screaming, but that his eyes would be closed. They weren’t. They were big, almond shaped and copper — almost like mine. He stared at me. I gave him a knuckle and he gummed it — still staring. He saw everything about me: the chicken pox scar on my forehead, the keloid scar beside it, the absent-minded boozy cigarette burn my father had given me on my stomach. Insults and epithets that had been thrown like bricks out of car windows or spat like poison darts from junior high locker rows. Words and threats, which at the time they’d been uttered, hadn’t seemed to cause me any injury because they’d not been strong enough or because they’d simply missed. But holding him, the long skinny boy with the shock of dark hair and the dusky newborn skin, I realized that I had been hit by all of them and that they still hurt. My boy was silent, but I shushed him anyway — long and soft — and I promised him that I would never let them do to him what had been done to me. He would be safe with me.”
In his critique of American society, Thomas leans heavily on “Invisible Man,” of course, but also on T. S. Eliot, in ways both acknowledged and unacknowledged. There is more than a touch of Prufrock’s nihilism: the profound isolation of an elevated spirit ill suited to the baseness of the wider world; the despair of the hobbled stallion obliged to run the rat race. Fighting a fate preordained as much by his genes as by his country, Thomas’s narrator is a man perpetually at risk. His tormented psyche subtly reveals how such ostensibly innocent American pastimes as baseball and golf can become vicious backdrops to the disillusionment of the marginal, and how kindness can be poison to those on whom it is imposed — to the point where the refusal of gifts carelessly offered becomes a question of self-preservation. Whether or not capitalism is conducive to happiness, Thomas is adamant that the rich are truly better off than the poor — not because they have more stuff, but because they are spared the indignity of perpetually having a hand out. Of always asking.
But while in many ways pessimistic, “Man Gone Down” also relies on the Eliot of “Four Quartets.” There are flashes of hope throughout, and the narrator is ultimately kept buoyant by love’s promise. Indeed, he finds love even where it shouldn’t be; for example, in the calm after a particularly vicious beating (with an extension cord) at his mother’s hands: “And the places on my body where she’d whipped buzzed and seemed to rise with heat. It didn’t hurt. And I knew from her face, the crazy, random face gone soft and quiet that there was, shot through the both of us and through the air, love. There was light in that little room. It moved through me, warmer than my blood. It was in her. It was all around us — the sink, the table, the counter. Her face seemed to glow from a place I couldn’t discern. Love. And it wasn’t so particular as her love for me or mine for her; it seemed to have always been there, and through our rawness we both felt it — balm on wounds.” In a world of total dysfunction, healing plucked from the ether seems to be enough.
Thomas takes a risk in his choice of first-person narration. The “I” is necessarily solipsistic, and this “I” has a massive chip on his shoulder. He has a right to carry it, yes, as he bears the weight of what seems like absolutely everything without buckling. But he indulges at times in an arrogant self-pity that can undermine sympathy for his plight. Ashamed almost of joy, he tightropes the line between dignified abnegation and masochism — he refuses free food though he’s starving, revels in the denial of simple pleasures, takes sullen pride in being disliked by those in a position to help him. That said, this “I” also makes himself vulnerable. He is a hero — a writer — constantly in dialogue with himself, admitting his fear of the machine as he feeds it. While often showing self-righteous disdain for the mediocre world that ignores his worth, he consistently puts himself out there to be judged as well — exposing his own pettiness, his own limitations as a father, husband, son, friend, man.
“Man Gone Down” might have been shorter. The scope of Thomas’s project is prodigious, though, and the end result is an impressive success. He has an exceptional eye for detail, and the poetry of his descriptive digressions — “the heaving surface of the water is what the night sky should be — moving and wild, wavering reflections of buildings on both sides, dark and bright, like thin, shimmering clouds” — provides some respite from the knowledge that the city he loves can truly crush a man’s spirit. A Boston-bred African-American writer who lives in Brooklyn with his wife and their three children, Thomas seems to have fully embraced the “write what you know” ethos. And what he knows is how the odds are stacked in America. He knows the unlikelihood of successful black fatherhood. He knows that things are set up to keep the Other poor and the poor in their place. More than anything else, he knows how little but also — fortunately — how much it can take to bring a man down.
Kaiama L. Glover is a professor of French literature at Barnard College.
- How did you meet Pedro Almodóvar?
Raymond Meier“I dream in both Spanish and English. When I was making ‘Don’t Move’ in Italy, I spoke Italian, and then I dreamed in three languages. That was scary: I’d wake up and think, Who am I?”
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Pretty Penny
Q. How did you meet Pedro Almodóvar, the writer and director of “Volver,” who wrote the part of Raimunda for you?
“Volver” is our third film together. As a young girl, I was always dreaming of being an actress, and the height of that dream was to work with Pedro. When I was 18, my first film, “Jamón Jamón,” had just come out, and I was home, blow-drying my hair, listening to the [Ennio] Morricone score from “The Mission.” Morricone had just done the music for Pedro’s movie “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” and I listened to the music from “The Mission” every day all day for a month. That way, in my mind, Pedro was present in my house.
So, the phone rings and my then-boyfriend said it was Pedro calling. My family knew of my feelings for Pedro, so I came to the phone, expecting a joke. But it was that voice! I knew it was Pedro immediately. That hello was the beginning of my life.
You had trained as a ballet dancer.
Since I was 4, I danced. My parents had normal jobs, but they pushed me into music and theater and ballet. I now think my parents gave me so many lessons because I had so much energy. All that dancing and sweating was exhausting. It calmed me down. And then I discovered acting — I was always tired at the end of the day.
How did Almodóvar tell you about “Volver,” which is about a family of women and is loosely autobiographical? In many ways, you play a character that resembles his mother.
He told me parts of the story five years ago. At first, he thought I might play another role, the daughter. But I wanted to play a woman. I never get to play women — only girls.
Even though Pedro wrote the part with me in mind, he had very definite ideas about the character. For three months, we rehearsed. I took cooking lessons — I learned to chop properly — and then we would eat what we prepared because Pedro wanted us to be aware of the taste of our food. I also worked with a flamenco singer and took lessons to lower my normal speaking voice to sound older. I also started cleaning my own house. There are many scenes in the film where I clean, and I wanted it to look right. My family was in shock. They said: “Penélope, do you have a fever? Why are you doing the dishes?”
You seem more comfortable when you are acting in Spanish. Is English difficult for you?
Not any longer. But when I got my first English-speaking role, in “The Hi-Lo Country,” in 1997, I didn’t know a word of English. I learned most of my lines phonetically. I would hide in the bathroom and cry because I couldn’t understand what people were saying. I don’t like missing anything, so that pushed me to learn the language. I’ve made over 35 movies, and many of them have been in English.
What language do you dream in?
I dream in both Spanish and English. When I was making “Don’t Move” in Italy, I spoke Italian, and then I dreamed in three languages. That was scary: I’d wake up and think, Who am I?
You must like to work. Do you ever take vacations?
Not really. In my head, I think I took last summer off, but I worked all but four days. Even on holiday, I work. I plan out a vacation — this year, for Christmas, I’m going to take my whole family to the Caribbean — but, then, I work. It’s terrible; ever since I got a BlackBerry, my bathroom can be my office. My family knocks on the door and says, “We know you’re working in there — come out to the sun, Penélope.” I need to learn how not to work.
You’re often typecast in American movies as the exotic beauty. Won’t it be hard to go back to playing the exotic beauty after “Volver”?
Absolutely. It’s time for a change: I want difficult material. I want to be frightened when I go to the set. I still audition for parts. I’ll put myself on tape when I want something. I hate when actresses complain about how they were ugly as children and how they’ve had to overcome so much pain. I’m allergic to those kind of complaints. We all have our battles: if you have an accent in Hollywood, they underestimate you. They think you’re unsophisticated. And, then, if you look a certain way — it’s very hard not to be typecast. But now I have to be very selective.
Do you have any specific upcoming projects in mind?
Well, one of the things I’d like to do is a musical. My favorite Christmas gift was my first tutu, which I received when I was around 6. I was so excited. And I’d like to do any kind of movie with Javier Bardem. It’s so obvious that we would make a great on-screen couple. Why are we not working together?
There is talk of Almodóvar directing you and Antonio Banderas in a film. As a couple, you presented Almodóvar with his Oscar for best foreign film for “All About My Mother” in 2000.
That was a crazy night. The evening before the Oscars, I was at a reception at the Spanish consulate in L.A. The food was delicious, and I bit into an empanada and I broke my front tooth. I heard that crack and the world stopped. The next day was the first time I would be presenting an Academy Award, and I had a broken tooth. I was screaming for a dentist, and, finally, Antonio got his dentist, who was hosting a party at his house, to come to his office at 1 a.m. and help me. So when Pedro won, I could smile without fear. I had all my teeth.
