Koolaids (2 page)

God in all his mercy decided to send my husband home just in time. We met him going down the stairs. We took him down with us to the makeshift shelter in the building's underground garage.

We arrived at the same time as the Sanyuras. Labiba Sanyura was in her nightgown. How embarrassing for her, I thought. She did not even have time to put something on. Although, with her weight, she should not walk around the house in a nightgown. The children were all excited. They tried to find out the news from each other. My husband asked if anybody knew which floor was hit. Someone said the shell had hit the fourth floor. My first thought was how lucky we were to be higher up. This made up for all the times I cursed our luck having to use the stairs to go up eight flights when the electricity was out. As if we all had the same thought at the same exact instant, we all looked around to see if the Habayebs were down here. They were not. I started praying they were not at home. I realized it was not very likely. My eyes started tearing.

Najwa Habayeb is my friend.

My husband, bless him, said someone should go up and check on them. Basil Rawda screamed, “Are you crazy?” My husband said, “If they are up there, they would need our help.” Rawda, who is a very unpleasant man, said, “Then you go up. If you want to orphan your children, you go up.” My husband got a hard look in his eyes, which I knew so well, and said he was going up. I was so proud of him. Najib Hafez said he would accompany him.

I told my husband I was coming along. I had to check on Najwa. He convinced me I was acting silly. We could not risk both our lives. They left and stayed up there for fifteen minutes. I started getting hysterical. Rawda told me my husband was crazy. I told him he was an asshole. That shocked both of us. He never said another word for the entire day. My children were distracted, but I kept waiting. The shells kept falling and falling. I felt my control slipping.

When my husband came into the garage carrying Najwa, her face covered in blood, I lost it. I screamed. The children screamed. Mr. Hafez, who followed my husband, was carrying Marwa, Najwa's four-year-old daughter. Everybody stared at them in disbelief. I got myself under control and ran to help my husband put her down. He told us Najwa's husband and three boys were dead. Killed by the explosion. Najwa was hit by two pieces of shrapnel. One was lodged in her stomach and the other seemed to have cut her forehead. Marwa, who was in the middle of everything, was completely untouched. We had no bedding or pillows down in the garage. I sat down and placed Najwa's head on my lap. My husband covered her with his jacket. We had to wait a long time before we were able to take her to the hospital. They all left me with her and started talking among themselves.

I don't recall much of what happened for the twelve hours before we were able to drive her to the hospital. All I remember is Marwa never left our side and she never cried. I also remember talking to Najwa constantly even though she was unconscious. I remember singing her favorite song to her,
“Tal'a Min Beit Abuha,”
which translates into “She's Leaving Her Father's House.”

…

Scott died in 1990. They never really figured out what finally killed him. You know how some people die and it seems just right? They are at peace. They have a glow about them in their last days. They say the wisest things. Scott wasn't one of those.

…

A time unknown. A life unborn.

My life has become nothing but regret. When the nurse told me I was HIV positive, I wanted to scream. Hold on a minute. Hold on. I haven't even begun to live my life. I thought I had more time.

After a childhood of complete and utter confusion, I started grasping who I was when I turned fourteen. It was not a single event which precipitated a change. It was gradual. My fourteenth year, 1974, was the happiest year of my life. I had finally adjusted to living in Lebanon. The war started in 1975. When I was told I was to be sent out of the country, I wanted to scream. Hold on a minute. Hold on. I haven't even begun to live my life. I thought I had more time.

…

THE WORST PAINTER OF ALL TIME

When Ben Baxter noticed his first KS lesion, he went on disability. Having worked as a corporate benefits consultant, he had set himself up well. He was covered, and would be able to live on disability for the rest of his life, albeit a shorter one now. Nevertheless, he handled his early retirement, as he called it, with gusto.

Ben's lover was an accountant who loved to paint. He had gone to art school, and spent a lot of his free time copying the masters, both traditional and modern. Art being a part of his life, Ben decided he too could be a painter. Now that he was living the life of leisure, he could concentrate on being an artist. With the help of his lover, he got set up with materials as well as a gorgeous, large easel.

Now, one has to know that Ben was crazy, or maybe I should just say funny. After all, he was a New Yorker, and had a master's degree in psychology from Columbia. Come to think of it, I take it back, he was crazy. We got along very well. We were, for whatever reason, the closest of friends, even though I was unable to stop making fun of him. It may have been because both of us were East Coast queers living in San Francisco.

At the time, some things in my life were changing. I had seen an exhibit of my friend Mohammad's work at a downtown gallery, and my whole view of art changed. For the first time, I started entertaining the idea that maybe I could paint. I walked into Ben's house for a dinner party. Ben was strategically placed before his canvas with a brush in his hand. “I just have to add some touches,” he said, and kept adding touches until all the dinner guests came in. That was Ben, not just a painter, but a drama queen too. The painting was a copy. Since his lover copied all the masters, Ben was following in his footsteps. Except Ben was not copying any of the masters, he was copying a bad painter who painted naked Asian boys. The original paintings were really bad: no depth, no understanding of color, and composition from hell. Ben's copies were worse, and throughout his “career,” he never got better.

I learned a lot from Ben's painting. Technically, it was the first time I saw anybody do a grid to copy a painting. It was an epiphany. I had never thought of myself as being able to paint because my drawing skills were atrocious. Watching the grid, I realized maybe I did not have natural ability, but I sure could do that. More important, I watched Ben. Painting became a panacea for all that ailed him. His spirits were lifted. I was so impressed, I asked Ben to help me start painting.

Ben was very helpful, but he was very confused by how I started to paint. My first paintings were like nothing he had ever seen and he made sure to tell me so. Whereas Ben was studying naked Asian boys, I was studying color. These paintings were formless, nothing more than color explosions. At that point I had very little interest in representation, while he thought naked Asian boys were what art was about. Let me elaborate a bit about Ben's paintings. The originals he copied were very flat. They looked like color by numbers. Draw in a sky and fill it with paint, draw in the eye and fill it with paint. Ben's were even worse. I once asked him if he thought the sky was all one color, cerulean blue. He had no idea what I was talking about. Whether it was sunset, sunrise, cloudy day, or sunny day, Ben's skies were always cerulean blue.

Ben and I got our first show together. It was a nonjuried show by the local gay bulletin board service to which we both belonged. I did not feel I was ready. I had been painting for about five months, but the show was done because of the notes which I uploaded to the BBS when I started painting. I could not back out. Ben, on the other hand, was ecstatic. People were about to see his genius! He entered one of his naked Asian boys and a copy his lover made of Léger's
La Lecture.
He proudly told me nobody would be able to figure the Léger was a Léger copy since
La Lecture
had not been seen in the US since 1945. How can one explain that anybody can tell a Léger painting because of the style? It was then I realized he was simply artistically blind. Couldn't see worth shit. It is said that Skinner taught pigeons to tell the difference between a Monet and a Matisse. Those pigeons could tell more about painting than Ben.

Ben continued painting and produced one horrible painting after another. He thought they were all masterpieces. He gave them to friends. They never knew what to do with them. They hid them in closets and brought them out when he came to visit. He kept on painting. He kept on painting until he really couldn't see worth shit due to CMV retinitis.

Ben died this morning at 5:19
a.m
. The world lost a bad painter and a great soul. I miss him already.

…

I always thought if Beethoven could do it, so could I. The truth is I am not Beethoven. Hell, I am barely a John Tesh. When I started losing my eyesight, I could not paint anymore. I could not force myself. My dealer said she would be able to sell out a show if I came out with some new paintings. I could not. I destroyed all my paintings, even the 60 by 80s I kept for myself. My studio is deserted. If I could not see my paintings anymore, no one else would.

I heard some collector sold one of my paintings to the Museum of Modem Art for five times what he paid for it three years ago. They must think I am dead or something.

…

Georges was my introduction to bisexuality. He was bisexual. I wasn' t. He porked both my cousin and me. That made him a bisexual. It also made him my hero.

A big scandal erupted when it was found out he had deflowered my cousin. My stupid cousin arrived home with a smile on her face and blood on her panties. Her father threatened to blow off Georges's head. She claimed he forced her. He claimed otherwise. They were both fourteen. Her father could not shoot Georges since he was so young. Many of my uncle's friends suggested he would feel much better if he shot Georges anyway. My uncle settled on being miserable for the rest of his daughter's life. My cousin, who was a fairly attractive girl, ended up dying a spinster at an early age. Her father was able to be happy after her funeral.

…

Cervantes told me history is the mother of truth. Borges told me historical truth is not what took place; it is what we think took place.

So Billy Shakespeare was queer.

Ronnie was the greatest president in history, right up there on Mount Rushmore.

AIDS is mankind's greatest plague.

Israel only kills terrorists.

America never bombed Lebanon.

Jesus was straight. Judas and he were just friends.

Roseanne's parents molested her as an infant.

Menachem Begin and Yasser Arafat deserved their Nobels.

And Gaetan Dugas started the AIDS epidemic.

…

I met Scott in 1980. We were both twenty. I saw him across the dance floor at the Stud. I knew who I was going home with that night. Scott was my type to a tee. Pug-nosed, baby-faced, blond, with a cute butt was my kind of boy. I walked all the way across the space and cornered him. Convincing him to come back home with me was a piece of cake. All I had to do was mention I was a painter. He had a thing for artists, he said. I had a thing for cute blond things. He said he loved my accent. I said I loved his butt. Off to my studio in North Beach we went.

We never consummated our desires. We arrived at my studio. I turned the light on. He walked over to the painting I had finished that day. He stood in front of it entranced. At first I was flattered. After the first five minutes I started getting horny. I stood behind him contemplating my painting and started rubbing my crotch on his behind. The scene was turning me on. Fucking the cute butt of a boy admiring a painting of mine was my idea of heaven. Scott then started to speak and I lost my erection. He started telling me about my life, my dreams, my fears. He started telling me about my mother, about my father. He told me about the war which tore my life apart. He related what he saw in the painting. It was the first 60 by 80.

We spent that night in bed talking. We never fucked, ever. He meant everything to me. That first night he started calling me
Habibi,
which means “my lover” in my native tongue, a cognomen which nobody ever questioned, not even his future lovers. He never used my real name, or any of the numerous Americanized nicknames I picked up along the way. I had always assumed he found it difficult to pronounce. I was wrong. His last words before he took his last breath were, “I love you, Mohammad.” An impeccable pronunciation.

…

We live in a neighborhood called Galerie Semaan. It is named after the furniture store which designates the edge of the neighborhood. The area will become famous years later because of the fierce battles that occurred there, but for now it is simply my neighborhood. It is on the southeastern side of Beirut, about a mile from the beach. It is right on the edge of Beirut, after which you have the mountains and the various suburbs. The neighborhood proper consists of about ten buildings, most of which have the six floors allowed by zoning in the area. It is bounded by the road to Chouifat and the South on one side, and an orange grove on another. On the west side, there is something called the New Road, which is neither new nor a road, but a wide gravel path beyond which are slums where Palestinians and some Shiites live.

The northern side is dominated by the Beirut-to-Damascus road. Although we live in a flat section of Beirut, the Beirut-to-Damascus road starts a steep incline right at the edge of our neighborhood.

For us kids, the boundaries are very important. We really cannot leave our neighborhood. We cannot cross into the orange grove because the guardian shoots trespassers, particularly if they are kids. I see him sometimes with his shotgun. He hunts birds that come into the grove. Hunting is everybody's favorite pastime. My dad tells me the guardian is harmless. None of us kids wants to risk it. We also do not go past the New Road. We don't mix with the people who live there. One day our neighborhood boys crossed over to play soccer on an empty lot there. Once we started playing, all the slum boys came out and wanted to play against us. We played them. We won, of course, since we were much better. When the game was over, the slum boys beat us up. We never cross that line again.