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August 29, 2010 at 5:37 am (Chapter Three – Two Sides:One Story) · Edit
True to my word this whole thing was shaping up to be very similar to my tour. It was a few months in and I was returning to my beginning place with this entire new way of being to make a few empty lip gestures to friends about what it was that I was learning before I returned back to the lifestyle that kept me away from them in so alien a place.
When I had come back on leave before I got as high as I could with Nicole who had sent me snowflakes in an envelope to that place that was so much like Hell. We had sex in her dormroom under the poster of the nuclear explosion. I got the rocket bird and the heart and the crow tattoos with the money that I had. I spent a few days at home watching my mom fall apart until she took me to the airport a complete wreck with the waterworks flowing.
This time the bus fiasco had cut me short on time. I had to race to drink at the Hideout and write in a coffee shop and smoke weed on a frozen street alone in the snow. All of my friends gathered together in the apartment I had shared with Brad and Magnum (the giant dog that looks like a mountain lion with the face of a gorilla, as mopey as her father, Brad) to say hello and goodbye to me. I spun around in circles saying strange things to familiar faces that I didn’t think really knew me any more looking constantly towards Emily on the arm of Drew who was looking mournfully at me in remembrance of how close we had come. Then it was time for everyone to go. I walked her out to her car as our feet squished through the black shit that covers Chicago in the winter, our breath freezing as it curled around us, her slow southern draw and huge, disbelieving and beautiful eyes. She told me she loved me and I looked at her with the same look I always gave her when that undiscussed thing was so near to being out in the air, the look that reminded her that I was not a good boy when the behavior was analyzed, we kissed. The moment froze, her car pulled away, and I was left stoned in the middle of the intersection at Evergreen and Hoyne where I had left from with a bag and a banjo a few months ago and I was frozen from all of the things that I desperately needed to think about but there just seemed to be no time.
The next morning Vinny drove me to Michigan. He dropped me off at the Cracker Barrel where my family was waiting for me. We were hours late. My mom was forgiving. Tim, her husband drove us back to their trailer park. I went out that night and bought whiskey and drank it while walking on the railroad tracks nursing the heaviness in my chest.
I wrote this:
Home is a word which unravels as life winds on. It is a term of layers which, for me, has become a way to define, at the most concise, the region in which I was born, but more nebulously the entirety of my social network and everything that makes me feel comfortable. For the time being home is my mom’s trailer park in Charlotte, Michigan.
Mom’s place is always freakishly clean. Every time I come home she grabs my clothes from me immediately and begins washing my laundry no matter how hard I fight her on the point that I am a grown man and I do my own laundry now. I do not understand what psychological fit drives her to do this but after having had a handful of comments on my undesirable smell I was happy for her obsession. Just this once.
My family operates mostly be flashing randomized emotions at irregular intervals while engaging in non-stop chatter. I’ve only been able to tolerate this trait since mom and her husband TJ have started smoking grass. These manic emotional frequencies were virtually impossible when mom was going through her last phase of hyper Christianity. I don’t understand what makes us like this. We just seem to, as a family, revel in our abilities to experience every emotion in a symphony of dischordant notes with little idea of tempo. I ma endeared to the lifestyle by force of habit.
For the first few hours around the house we smoked pot and tried to figure each other out. For the first time since I can remember the TV was not on. We stonedly gave embittered diatribes against the government, society, commercials, consumerism, and my personal favorite: the way the nation has let Michigan die despite its almost continuous production of our nations most valuable resource for nearly a century.
It is decidedly unreal and sick that after having spawned and maintained the domestic automotive industry which is, I believe, the leading contributing factor to our economic, war time, and lifestyle successes as a nation, this is now degenerating and rusting in the factories, its workers displaced to a barrens of worklessness and frustration. A generation of people trained by legions previous generations to produce, to work, all day every day are now binding their strong fingers and wondering if this system is really going to let them starve and going mad for lack of something better to do with their hands. We are not comfortable without work. It is not out of laziness that a midwesterner will be found idle. It is misuse.
I’m sitting in another coffee shop in the town I lived in when I first got back from Cuba. My mom brought me to work today so I’m trying to kill some time. It always weirds me out being here. I got so bored and I can never remember what I used to do to get over this restlessness.
I do remember now that I think of it. I got lost in my hopes for love and the future. What a mistake.
So I’ve been pleasantly whittling away my time here in the heart of the spreading economic depression, wrapped in a blanket on the couch, eating macaroni and cheese and talking with my family about the dangers of industrialism and smoking pot which we hide when Grandma comes over.
My sister, Jessica, is very pregnant right now which makes me feel guilty for some reason. Something about this new fetus makes me feel selfish and childish. It makes me feel like I’ve been swept up in some fantasy that has made it so that I don’t understand responsibility. And I guess that it is true. She will very soon be living a life which is entirely more “real” than mine in the sense that she will have at least one thing in her life that she cannot just up and leave. That’s it. It makes me feel uncertain about my restlessness. That thing that makes me perpetually leaving. Well, needless to say, she isn’t going anywhere for a while.
The thing I look forward to the least on any “leave” home is the goodbyes. Especially the goodbyes I have to give to mom. She has got a realy way of breaking my heart like nobodies business.
When I left her behind me at the Grand Rapids Airport when I was going back for the rest of my tour to Cuba I could hear her crying for the majority of the terminal walkway. She has cried every goodbye since. It makes me feel heavy and wrong. Why do the things that I feel like I need to accomplish hurt her so much? Its as if the thing which is almost my definitive character quirk of exploration and leaving is the one thing that causes her the greatest amount of anguish. It makes me not want to come home at all, but I know that would hurt her more. But this is not my home any more. These streets, though they nurtured me while whatever virus I have which makes me impermanent was settling in, transforming me from a trailer park dreamer into a lean explorer, are not familiar to me any more.
They no longer tell me anything about the life I want to live. They are like fallow fields that I overharvested so they will never produce again. I have used them for what they were worth and abandoned them. Cities, women, books, bikes and packs of cigarettes are all alike in this fashion for me. And I’m not saying that is good, or even not horrible. I’m just saying that is how it is. When I’ve depleted the resources of one provisional relationship, long before that even, I start to look around for another fix. Some crop which has yet to be harvested. And even though I will always remember everything save for the cigarettes fondly, I have not found a way to return to any of these things in a way which is not laced and tangled with apologies and despair.
This is the town where I learned that I could still love after Cuba, even though it was a sick love. But now my friends are gone like pollen on the wind. We’ve all left this place to roost in lands more fertile.
This is the way of things in Michigan.
My old comic book shop is above this coffee shop and the parlor where I got a majority of my tattoos is right next to it. I spent a lot of time here thinking about what I wanted to be. Now, more than ever before, I feel like I am what I wanted to be, but I don’t think I ever imagined that it would feel like this. Whatever this feeling is.
Time to meet mom for lunch.
And then it was time to go again. The whole family loaded into the car and we drove to Chicago. They let me off at the office up on Diversey. Mom did her best and failed. Grandma gave me 150 dollars. The van pulled away. I got drunk with some friends and then I took a train to O’Hare.
And then I was flying away to England. Some said I would never return.
“did you ever see any torture?”
September 1, 2010 at 5:58 am (Chapter Three – Two Sides:One Story) · Edit
I watched the streetlights curl over the windows of the sleek car that Asim was driving me towards my greatest fear in. Asim was sharp and proper, well dressed and spoken. He was telling me about the strings that had been pulled to get me admitted into the country but from my seat on the wrong side of the car I heard nothing except the hissing of my brain going off like a sparkler on my first crisp night over the ocean.
Then there were the lights of the hotel lobby. I was spinning around trying to take everything in until my spinning stopped any my eyes focused on two smoldering shadows from which two keen obsidian eyes glared out analytically, all of this occurring on the dark, bearded face of a short man, both tense and easy in his movement. He spoke to me in the Queen’s English.
This was Moazzam Begg. He was the first of the alleged terrorists and former detainees that I would meet. By shaking his hand I was introduced to a scenario that I had dreaded from my cot in TK22. I was meeting a man who knew what we had done. There was no obscuring the truth with him, and from one glimpse into his eyes I knew that nothing had been forgotten.
It was something like two in the morning. We went out for Indian food. Moazzam sat across from me, my nervous and tired eyes completely blank, overwhelmed by the stimulus. He told me that he harbored no resentment. He had told me this before in emails when he had introduced himself to me electronically after I testified about my experiences, the first guard to ever attempt such a silly thing after we had all signed papers that expressly prohibited such behavior.
He understood how things like the military and war work, and he knew that all of us lost and confused young men and women were just trying to make good by our obligations. It was at this point that I wanted to correct him. We weren’t just honorable citizens. We brought a lot of excessive anger and resentment down with us and we made damn sure that whoever was in those cages knew that we were very upset about how things had happened.
We did that of our own free will, well beyond the guidelines of the Standard Operating Proceedure, and to hear him talk as if we had all gone down there as good natured people of honor and duty made me feel terrible. There was no need to write off all the harm that had been done because it was more the fault of the tyrants and CEO’s who ran our country than ours.
We still played our part. I had certainly done mine.
I had been moved to the office after a few months on the blocks due to a combination of being completely unqualified to behave in the way that they needed me to while working with the “worst of the worst” (a condition I had tried to make clear to them before the deployment) and computer skills which are a valuable commodity when you have a prison camp that is run electronically via computer.
One of my tasks in the DOC (Detentions Operations Center) was to monitor the notes of the day. These were notes that guards made about detainees behavior. Most detainees only had a few notes that documented only the most radical behavior, but for two years ISN 552 (Mr. Begg) had been the single occupant of an isolation cell with a pair of guards all to himself. These guards rigorously documented his behavior as if they were putting together a documentary film on some bizarre creature. I had been an avid reader of his notes. I shared his temper tantrums and his fits, his pleasant quips even down to his work out routine. Now that I wasn’t seeing any detainees, I was just reading their stories. 800 stories as written by the men and women of the Joint Task Force.
Could I tell him this? Certainly not at dinner. I would wait, I decided. For now I decided to focus on how lucky I was. Not many people get to meet face to face with their greatest fear, their most virulently barking dog. They have their nemesis tucked away in some vague and non-material thing, but here I was face to face with mine having dinner, soaking in the moment and all of the complicated feelings which left me feeling paradoxically numb. So this is how it feels like to meet a man you detained.
We went back to the hotel. I was shown my room and then I was swallowed in an oblivion of sleep.
There was an urgent knocking disturbing my disturbed dreams. Half asleep I answered the door and there was a piebald wizard standing there in a tailored suit. His eyes were blazing madly and his wild beard was long. He took my hand in his and shook it. Then he invited me down to breakfast, his words put together with a familiar syntax, the way English sounds when you learn it from a prison cell picking up words from your nasty little guards.
As he was leaving he reared his wizards aura around on me again and told me that his name was Jarallah. Jarallah Al Marri.
Over a continental breakfast Jarallah dismissed any attempt of mine to ask him about where he had come from. He had more important things on his mind. He wanted me to know about his brother who is still to this day kept as a political prisoner on US soil without formal charge for reasons probably everb it as untrue as the reasons that Jarallah had wound up where he was.
Two boys from the same family detained by the same unlawful roundup. Their mother must have lost her mind.
Jarallah begged me to call the might of the American peace movement in on this case. I just sagged against the back of my chair with failure on my face. Now that I was here I knew very well that no kind of activism or people’s movement will stop these things from happening. Until war becomes unprofitable these kinds of stories will continue to happen. But how do you tell that to a man who wants you to help save his brother?
I promised him I would tell people about his brother and see if we might be able to start a stateside campaign but I was not feeling particularly optimistic.
So here was my second detainee who had been detained for reasons unknown and eventually released without charge to go back to his normal life after seven years which showed on his skin in the form of mottled patches where no pigment grew, a condition that came about as a result of swallowing so much frustration and OC spray.
He finally told me that he had been kept in Camp Five.
Camp Five was a more permanent kind of prison than the open air cages of Camp Delta. It was built to house the long term residents of Guantanamo. They had finished building it in the middle of our deployment somewhere around the summer of 2004. My unit was the first unit to work those blocks. My roommate was one of the first to be a part of that special mission.
I had found out in my own way how violent my roommate, Shaw, could be when he came home loaded one night, crawled on top of me and started beating me in my sleep. This scene ended a few minutes later with Shaw and Hiccox wrestling around in our room knocking everything over while I stood outside in my underwear and my blood yelling for authority of some kind.
I wondered how much of this Jarallah had seen. I assumed quite a bit by the sounds of the stories Shaw used to tell.
Meth did terrible things to his brain.
Then Sara was there at the hotel. There was no time for sentiment or really even a proper introduction because we had to be hurrying along to the BBC for our first interview.
So Sara and me are sitting across from these two men in the back seat of an English cab on a frozen morning when all Jarallah was wearing was his suit which I would come to find out were the only clothes that he had brought to wear because at home he wears a white robe and Moazzam was staring at Sara in disbelief that I had invited my girlfriend and Sara was writing in her journal, taking notes and all I could seem to do was stare out the window at all of the people moving around the streets at the bottom of these old buildings separated by such small and hectic streets.
I turned around to the group and I started talking about how everything is so much bigger in the good old U S of A and then I stopped and waited and then said: “except our cells of course.” I flicked a nervous eye to Moazzam’s stern face to see if it had broken but It had not. Then I started apologizing which is my expertise.
“Is it ok to make jokes?” I hazarded.
Moazzam started to laugh a deep belly laugh and he didn’t even need to say that it was even though he did. I just knew that it was.
It is not always the case. Often times humor seems like the only response that won’t lead to madness. Rooster taught me that. It’s a good lesson. But some situations are too heavy for even humor. I didn’t want this to be one of them.
I hadn’t brought any nice clothes with me. I brought what I had. I was wearing an old Army jacket with a blue hoodie that I had stolen and painted Iraq Veterans Against the War on. I had a few dingy pairs of pants and some combat boots. I didn’t do it out of malice or any such thing, I just didn’t have any other clothes so I figured it was the message that was important.
We got to the studio and our crazy crew was led through a labyrinth of corridors and sound proof rooms, vending machines and waiting rooms until at last we were deposited in a room that looked like a storage area for excess wires. There were so many wires plugged in to so many things.
A very trim TV man came into the room with a few people who started putting things on me and then I was in a chair and the camera was on and this guy was asking me questions. We talked for a long time. I was too long winded and used way too many long explanations to convey a few simple points. He kept pushing for the torture. He wanted the torture stories. He wanted the electric bed frames in rickety shacks, water boarding in blacked out trailers. I knew that was what they all wanted. They would settle for nothing less. But none of that happened in Gitmo.
What did happen there was that under trained, non-MOS qualified personnel were left to interpret the Standard Operating Proceedures as they would on a case by case basis even though this frequently unread document was rarely upheld anyway with little to zero supervision by any ranking authority. The sally port system worked out great for Camp Delta in this way: if any commanding authority does decide to slide out of the airconditioned office buildings to go check out what is going on in the camp, everybody working the blocks has received advanced warning that there is brass on the court so get your shit together. Most of the time the highest ranking person around was an E7 watching a dozen or so E5’s herd together the E4 mafia. This left a lot of time for whack behavior. And some of us acted a fool.
I had meant to say that some of us had completely lost our minds and sense of human decency and took out large personal grievances out on people we were merely supposed to feed and move. I didn’t mean to say everyone. I didn’t mean to indict everyone I knew there. All of the good guys who just did their jobs and never did anything wrong. There were a lot of those guys. And girls. I was one of them. But the job took a kind of psychosis to do. In a way we all became psychotics because when the violence happened I don’t think any of us felt anything and some of us experience pleasure while others were absolutely disgusted but we were all there and we all saw it and we all knew that maybe some of these people weren’t guilty of what they told us they were. For that matter, they didn’t even tell us what they were there for.
I rambled for far too long. I said a lot of things. I gave them a lot of words. I hadn’t met an editing room yet and I was still naïve and believed that nobody would use me because I was trying to do a good thing.
I can believe anything I want to really.
There were three more interviews that day and onward throughout the week until we left to do the speaking tour. I knew that this would be an intense schedule and I had agreed to it fully but the pace really freaked me out. Everybody wanted to know how I felt and all I wanted to say was that it is pretty hard to process how you feel about meeting people that have occupied your nightmares for years while I took my guilt out on myself and my loved ones when you have a camera in your face all fucking day asking you how you felt.
Moazzam was taking it all in stride, always clean and sharp and ready to do a spot on interview, guiding the conversation directly to where he wants it, keeping it there and keeping it cool. Jarallah took his interviews the way he took everything. If he didn’t like the question, and he often didn’t, he started slamming down a puritanical belief that an injustice happening anywhere taints the value of every moment.
Al Jazeera. CNN. BBC Radio, all kinds of smaller alternative press. Hour after hour, jamming packaged sandwiches into our mouths between interviews, rushing to get us all in front of as many cameras as possible so that the whole world could see what it looked like when there wasn’t razor wire, shackles and uniforms involved in the scene.
Every day was followed by its night starting at four or five o’clock.
Those nights all blend together now like dreams, rapid and surreal, people and environments shifting to a strange rhythm of logic. There was the night that I was taken to a Mosque and I stood there in my socks, my combat boots amongst the elegant shoes designed to be taken off frequently.
They got down on their knees and they prayed to their God and they sang that song that they had sang for years and for one minute I was back on Mike block at the tail end of a night shift that I’d spent on the back stairwell reading Vangogh’s letters to his brother and the sun was coming up over the sea, slowly softening the science fiction florescence of the nighttime lights that reminded me of the strange greenish blue glare of gas stations and then all of these men who’d been sleeping on metal slabs got up, washed their feet and their faces and their noses and they pointed themselves in one direction and they began to sing and the song they sang was so beautiful but so hopelessly lost on the ocean breezes that I began to truly hate their God who was also my mother’s God and at one point in time my own. Every God who had ever been the thing to which people sent their dreams when there was no hope. So many people had been killed for that word.
From the vantage point of that moment I could only think that if there was a God it had done a terrible job.
But now I was older and less angry and I could see that this God had been the only thing holding these two men together. It was these beautiful gestures sent out to be lost in the wind that had kept these men sane because you either put your faith in Allah or you lose your fucking mind. Those are your options in Guantanamo Bay.
There was a mixture of humble respect and cultural alienation happening inside of me. Inside of this place gawking in on this scene and having a PTSD episode in the middle of a mosque. The feeling was too familiar.
The prayer ended and it was time to eat.
We walked to the restaurant across the street. I lagged behind and used a cigarette as an excuse to collect myself and calm my nerves which were ringing like beloved banjo strings.
And then I walked into the restaurant. I had been warned about the situation but I didn’t know what to do with the information so I ignored it but now it was happening.
In the lobby were about ten people. All of them were familiar. There was a very large man with a happy face that I remembered instantly. I had seen him in camp one and I remember reflecting on his sense of calm when I was freaking out with a ticket home scheduled.
Then there was a panther dressed as a man, muscles coiled just like they were when he was pacing silently and slow in his cell staring out with a threatening mystique with anger set into his rigid features. He had worked out all of the time and people talked about him like a tiger. Only a select few wanted to be on any IRF team outside of his cell. There were horror stories of him handing a handful of guards their asses when they tried to get him out.
There was a man with a long nose who did not seem so familiar though he was the most talkative one of the bunch who most readily began to chat with me.
There were the three amigos who had played the role of MotorCycle Awesome from inside the wire. They had been detained on a wedding trip gone wrong and ended up in a three year honeymoon in Guantanamo. They had joked and hustled their way through their entire stay. They were well liked and working their block was seen as a pleasant way to spend your day. I never worked their block.
There was a tall lanky black man who appeared very serious and slightly detached from this group though he was undoubtedly a part of it and would be for the rest of his life.
We got our table. I believe the final count was fifteen. We ordered an amazingly complicated array of dishes which came out throughout the evening and just continued to pile up. Everyone was so happy to see each other. They looked so free. They laughed and they told jokes about funny things the guards had done. Often they were speaking in Arabic so I would just listen to the sounds and watch the movement. It was like a giant family. I was made to feel completely welcome. I caught a few suspicious glances and I could understand why. They wanted to know if I was for real but they could tell that I wasn’t the type to fuck any of them over so there wasn’t much to forgive that I hadn’t already apologized enough for while I was there.
I issued so many apologies that year. I wish I’d written them all down.
I made it a point not to apologize at the dinner table.
A few nights later there was a lecture at the Friends Hall. I was smoking a cigarette on the front stoop, dancing to heat up. Off to my right this guy is standing there and he’s looking at me and then I knew exactly who he was and I had to act cool as my mind went haywire.
Oscar 12. You were the only person I ever worried about seeing again. I was so sure you wanted to kill me once.
Not Oscar 12 anymore. His name is Tarek.
We had met first on my first day on the blocks. As some kind of joke I spent my first day in Camp Delta on Oscar Block. If these men truly were the worst of the worst, then these people were the worst of the worst of the worst. They sat inside of solid steel boxes in a giant enclosed chicken coup with one small ventilating fan and a portal into the causeway where, as a guard, you are to walk.
The place was unbelievably hot and the OC hung in the air and tingled sensitive skin, igniting a small fire around my eyes as I walked from cell to cell staring in at these specimens of the alleged Al Qaida. Oscar Block was after all intended to keep people who were especially uncooperative on the regular blocks but probably more likely used as a way of isolating certain persons of interest.
In every window I saw a different way to go crazy in every different pair of eyes which flashed around wildly, some of them soaking every bit of visual information they could get out of the hole where my face was and some of them just lay catatonically on their bare metal slab while some others pace the few paces they can, constantly turning inside of their cells talking to themselves.
Oscar 12 wanted things. He yelled down the causeway “MP MP MP” until I showed up in his hole. He told me he needed some toilet paper. I told him that I would have to ask my sergeant if it was ok. He got very angry very quickly, annoyed with my inability to command enough authority to go out to the back and get a few sheets of toilet paper. I tried to explain to him that the SOP says that detainees on Oscar Block were only allowed toilet paper at certain hours and in certain quantities. He became irate.
He started screaming and swearing in his hood English. He called me a bitch in several different ways and told me that he would kill me if he could get out of the cell. I was pretty nervous. I kept shifting my eyes to the other end of the block where my trainers were smoking cigarettes in the air-conditioned booth. I finally decided that I would break the rules and just get the toilet paper because I’d look like a total fucking douche showing up in the guard shack asking if it was ok to do this.
I went out to the back and counted out eight sheets of toilet paper as per regulations and I walked back to the cell and I handed Oscar 12 his regulation amount of toilet paper with a snotty little attitude. He goes “what the fuck is this shit?” so I say “this is your fucking toilet paper man!” and he says “I can’t be wiping me fuckin ass with that shite!” “But this is how much you’re supposed to get! That’s what the SOP says man!” And he “nobody follows that fucking piece of shite around here.”
Then I told him that if I gave him any more he could make a knife out of the toilet paper. He called me a stupid asshole. I went back out and got him a whole ball of toilet paper, jamming it through his beanhole, my arm well inside of the cell. It was right about when he grabbed my hand with his one arm and twisted it while dropping down to the floor that I remembered that you shouldn’t put your arm into the beanhole. Then I was in the beanhole as far as my shoulder and head would allow.
I managed to wrestle my arm back. I snuck one last look at the hatred in his eyes through that little window and it was one look too many because I will never forget that face. I turned around and started walking towards my comrades ready to write up my first report but as I walked I realized that writing down that I had gotten my ass kicked by a one armed man who was trapped inside of a solid cell would not help my reputation any.
Now here he was again and there was no cage and he still only had one arm but something was different about his face. The anger was gone. His storm was over. At least for now.
After the speech that night he drove me to the restaurant where we were told to meet all of the big movers and shakers of this tour. He drove like a race car driver while steering with his knees, talking on the phone and shifting with his one good hand at all times, occasionally looking over to me to ask me questions about my impressions of Islam.
At dinner I sat across from him gawking, still not having the courage to tell him about the moment we had shared. Then he said: “I remember you.” To which I replied: “I remember you, too.” And then we were friends and we talked about how boring these people were and how ready we were for something different than lectures and talks about things.
He told me he appreciated what I was doing but I felt kind of stupid. What I was doing was nothing. The anger that he had to overcome is something bigger and more frightening than I could ever come to understand.
He had to take off eventually. One of the lawyer types who also chainsmoked cigarettes in spite of the reprimanding tone of the Muslims who allowed no booze or cigarettes took me out for a few drinks. He knew damn well where I was at and he knew that a little whiskey would do me some good. He was right.
I left Sara stranded amongst the activists. She was pretty pissed off when I got back from the bar smelling of booze.
When we got back to the hotel that night we sat down in bed as if we were dismounting a rocket ship.
The London part of the tour was over. The BBC had broadcast its clip. The only words that they had chosen to cut out of our talk were “Guantanamo Guard calls coworkers ‘Genuinely Psychotic.’” And my little bubble was shattered. Almost immediately I got a message from Or on Facebook. He told me that I was disgrace and he hoped that I would finally get it over with and kill myself. He posted this on my wall for all of my friends to see.
I was torn in two. Did I mean that? Really? No. Of course not. Not how it would be read by the men from my unit… Charlie Battery. Sergeant Johnson would read these words and he would think that I had meant him when really he was one of the best people I knew and there were other guys like Sergeant J. Jesus Christ, what had I done?
Bark, bark, bark go those mean old dogs.
something was missing
September 3, 2010 at 7:25 pm (Chapter Three – Two Sides:One Story) · Edit
Finally the day came for us to load ourselves into the car to begin the tour to the rest of the U.K. that wasn’t London. It was January 11th.
Our first stop was Brighton.
All of a sudden we just weren’t in the city. The skies were cloudy and pink. Jarallah was in the back seat yelling into two cell phones at once in Arabic on one side of me and on the other Sara had her computer out typing away while asking Moazzam questions. He was busy fussing with the navigational unit to be bothered. Our driver was a tough young Muslim kid with a sharp attitude who worked as the hired muscle for CagedPrisoners. His family was from Afghanistan. I’ll call him Charlie because he never liked his name being used.
We parked our car in front of a skinny building smashed between other skinny buildings on a block on a hill that looked like a colorful set of piano keys sloping off into the ocean at the end of the street. This was a bed and breakfast.
The people who ran the joint were praying when we walked in. We waited for them to finish in the hallway. When they were done they made a big show of joy to see Moazzam again and then they showed us to our rooms, eyeing Sara and I suspiciously. They gave us a room with two small beds. It was the smallest studio apartment ever and it was full of English charm.
We stepped out to see the town before the speech that night.
We walked all over the lanes and up and down the rocky ocean. Sara bought me a eukele so I started playing that pretty obsessively, weeping at heart for my banjo though I was. I just needed to make some kind of music.
I was stressed. I was crazy. There was a dark cloud over my head that was manifested in that eternal dark cloud over England that I was only now getting used to. I must be the only guy in the world with enough nerve to mope while on a free trip over seas. But I couldn’t stop thinking of my last free trip over seas. And I couldn’t stop talking about it in front of groups of people that I didn’t know for the next month. Babbling my way through this moment that ought to be so beautiful but here I was all fucked up and depressed with a beautiful woman trying to figure out what was wrong with me on foreign soil with a eukele while the sun was setting over water that I desperately wanted to cross and Sara took pictures and I forgot…
And then I was in front of more people with a microphone in my face. I looked at Jarallah’s face as he spoke. This would be the last time I would hear him forcefully construct English sentences, concise and emphatic, commanding an ethical dilemma with his eyes alone.
There was a new face. Omar’s face. Peaceful and positive and happy. He spoke next. He told very grim stories of things that had happened to his friends in a very humble way as if implying an apology for taking the time to tell you these stories. Like how ISN 727 had his eye poked out by a soldier in Guantanamo.
I think I spoke next. It was all doom and gloom.
Moazzam tied it all together at the end as per usual.
People asked questions. I needed to be alone.
When the show was over I said goodbye to Jarallah with what little he had left in the trunk of a cab that would take him to the train and eventually he’d be on a plane back to Qatar. Then I disappeared into the streets. I got a few beers and walked around drinking and trying to figure out if what was happening in my life was really real.
The next stop was Bristol. It was just Sara and Moazzam and Charlie and me in the car. It was so much more comfortable. I slept in the car most of the way.
The crowd here was dingier, less religious. There were a few punks. I instantly began to sort through which of them were potential drug friends. There were a few likely suspects.
Moazzam and I decided to do our speech in the format of a discussion between ourselves. This proved to be an effective way for him to help me coax out of myself what it was the audience was looking for. He was picking up my stories and he knew which ones would work best. In the last few speeches I had been a disaster, taking flight on long winded and nearly insane diatribes about the most vague elements of the detentions system.
The questions after the show were brutal. I remember being angry. Really angry. Somebody had said something unfair. But I forgot what it was.
After the talk I hid in a nook smoking cigarettes one after the other until I saw the opportunity to pounce on a detached group of likely stoners. I introduced myself. My guess was not off.
Half an hour later Sara and I were standing in a crazy punk squat full of bikes and copy machines. Anarchists were talking about action. A laid back fellow was tying me off my bag. I had taken some hits off of the huge spliffs that were slowly meandering around the party like zeppelins.
That was what was missing.
I did my nervous little dance that I do when I know I have to leave to go walk around.
It was a long walk back to the hotel. I had that pleasant tingle that I had missed so much.
My brain is like a dog. It does not know how to relax without being told, and for years I had trained it to focus on processing its business when I smoked. In this way, despite what some say, I am addicted to marijuana. But it isn’t such an unpleasant addiction though. I don’t smoke much. I usually just mix a tiny amount with some tobacco. Just enough to take the edge off and speed my mind up a bit. I smoke it all day though.
I knew that Moazzam would disapprove. There is no room in the Quran for smoking weed. But I wasn’t a Muslim and I didn’t think that it was wrong. I decided that I’d just have to keep it on the down low. I also decided only to smoke after the days work was done. I owed it to Moazzam to take these obligations seriously even though I was dressed like a freak.
Act professional.
I did a fairly good job of that.
preacher, preacher: the torture teachers
September 6, 2010 at 7:45 pm (Chapter Three – Two Sides:One Story) · Edit
The events were all strangely similar. Some were in ornate churches, others in Mosques. Some were in dingy community centers, some were in high dollar universities. All of them were full of people who stared at us while we talked to one another at a table. People wanted the stories but we almost always focused on the politics. We tried to emphasize the reality that all they needed to know was that the detentions system enacted by the U S of A during this bizarre and twisted war has lost any sense of legitimacy through the massive mistakes it made which lead to so much pain for so many families and people, which did us all an injustice and made it so that we should be ashamed of ourselves because in our fervor to fill cages with people that we could point our fingers at to blame for the atrocities that took place on that one bleak, national day when we were something together again because we all hated. These mistakes were evident in the numbers. I had taken on the responsibility of guarding 800 detainees. There were about 600 when I left. There were 237 men rotting in those cages during our speeches. Most of those people left there were only there because they would be killed if they weren’t sent back to the countries they had been rounded up in. For example, the Chinese Weegers who were handed over to the states by China because they are Muslims and we took them as political prisoners and put them in Guantanamo Bay as if they had been responsible for the attacks that happened on 9/11. Now they could not go back, like baby birds who have been in human hands, they will get pushed out of the nest by Mama Bird. It was all clear in the numbers and the facts and the laws. The laws were important. The Supreme Court had made three protests against JTF-GTMO which all went neglected.
But most importantly we tried to impress that GTMO was only the fucked up poster child of Bush and Cheney’s sick head fuck horror show. This was the camp they wanted you to see. They wanted you to know that we got them. We rounded them all up. Feel safe America. Go back to spending now please.
But as you drift off back to this electric consumer sleep, in some distant place, there is some horrible building where there are men who operate beyond the law doing horrible things to people who may or may not have had anything to do with this Al Qaeda business.
There is a tiered system of hell that one goes through to get to where we were talking about. First one must be detained on the battlefield. Now that all of Iraq and Afghanistan are “the battlefield” every citizen of those countries is now a possible enemy combatant. Maybe your door is kicked in and some dirty corn fed American boys with nothing but their faces showing from under all the gear and then you’re sitting with a bag over your head and flexy cuffs around your wrists.
Then you’re in some little shack and you’re talking to some young, snotty American kid asking you a list of questions and if that American kid doesn’t like you you’re wearing the bag again. Then you’re in a bigger place like Kandahar or Bagram or Abu Gharaib. There are large pens of general population, low interest people doing two week stints in the cage, or maybe you’re in a filthy cage of your own shackled to a wall with a man in the cell next to you that they call “The Animal” and he won’t stop talking to himself and there is a woman down the hall who screams violently and still you’re in these chains.
Then more bags and more flexy cuffs and one of these American kids is kicking you in the ribs while you pray, chained to the floor of some big, loud, cold airplane. You keep praying to your God, hoping that some day you will be rewarded.
You get off the plane and it’s hot as it can be. They take the bag off, take pictures, run you through the whole poking and prodding routine that the military loves to administer and then you find yourself sitting in this 5×8 cell. Now your interrogator wears a Hawaiian shirt and he doesn’t believe a word you say no matter how many times you try to tell him that you were just a regular person until the bombs came.
That’s what you need to know about Guantanamo and the renditions program. The torture is time and knowing that psychopaths run the world and they can do whatever they want to you when they’ve got a whole country so filled with fear that they won’t even do what they were trained to do anymore. They won’t even spend their money. So if you want to know if I saw torture while I was there, the answer is yes. I saw only torture all of the time as if I were in hell. I watched people torture themselves with anger and I saw torture in the eyes of the broken detainees limp against their cells learning new ways to overcome the hate as the time passes slowly. I handed out the shackles with specific instructions to put people in uncomfortable positions and I watched their ticket as their time in the booth turned into hours. And I tortured myself with guilt. In a place like that you either a demon or the damned and only the truly sick do not feel the reality of the pain.
Then outside into the cold nights with a dozen cigarettes hanging out of my mouth one after the other while the people filter past and said the same things outside of every one. They wanted me to know that I was very brave. I didn’t feel very brave. It is easy to talk a lot of shit about something. Real bravery would have been speaking up at times when I knew that nobody was going to say that something that was happening was wrong if I didn’t do it and I still didn’t do it. The days for me to be a brave man are over. It only makes me feel like a liar to be called brave now.
Finally we would end up at the Ibis. Sara and I could now navigate them in the dark, they were all so similar. Several nights we didn’t turn the lights on at all. We just found the places where we both habitually laid our shit and sat it down. In this way it was as if we slept in the same place every night. It was only the days that changed. Time was a very bizarre labyrinth during these days. There were no mile markers and the moments were so explosively perfect that I just wanted to be plugged in for all of them.
Between each city we drove. We were driving around in Moazzam’s family van with all of our gear loaded into the back. We sat in the car and processed what had happened at the last stop. We were like bank robbers always fleeing the scene day after day and trying to replay the story off of each other, working through our emotions on the characters that we were meeting and how things were handled and how we thought audiences were reacting to our talks.
Along the way we stopped several times.
Once we stopped in the Pennines. We walked along a ridge in the rocky hills amongst the purple brush that sat low on the ground as far as the eye could see. We walked out for a ways, a line of Muslim men dressed sharply and one bony hipster following behind. Omar tripped and fell in the mud. I laughed. I felt bad about laughing… but it was just one of those moments. He was pretty angry when he got up. He didn’t have any other clothes and he’d be giving the speech in these clothes later that night. We were all laughing now. Then he cheered up.
There was a small creek. The boys washed themselves and then they knelt to pray in a small clearing in the mid-afternoon glumness of an English countryside and again I wished that my eyes were cameras. When they stood up Omar told me that a man is rewarded for praying in more difficult places. I wanted to remind him that he had probably earned enough praying in difficult places cred but thought better of it. The moment was just too beautiful.
specialist pee pee
September 9, 2010 at 4:46 am (Chapter Three – Two Sides:One Story) · Edit
I have what you might call a skittish bladder. I’m not proud. It is just how I am. I’m a very nervous boy.
This bladder has caused me endless amounts of stress.
When they had me sign off on every shackle key in Camp Delta back in the Detention Block Blues days I used to dance for hours waiting for a lull in the stress so that I might skirt off to the bathroom which was on the other side of the trailer wall (yes, we worked from a trailer.) I had already given up lunches. I was too scared to lose track of those keys. One minutes lapse in attention to detail and I would be toeing the line with the Sergeant Major who was a scary man explaining how I’d come to lose one of the camp’s most sensitive items, those goddamn keys which were the same color as the sand. So I just did the dance.
People let it slide. Just one more quirk for the town queer.
But then one day…
We were in a convoy of humvees and we were driving from Battle Creek to Grayling for a weekend of fun, travel and adventure. I was driving. Chief Patrick was riding B side. A few minutes into the drive I realized that I had to pee. This condition careened out of control quickly. Within half an hour I was sweating bullets and we were nowhere near ready to stop. Chief was telling me to chill the fuck out. He suggested I pee in a bottle. I’m too classy for some things. I mean, I was committed to the Army, but only so much. Finally I could not take it for one minute more. I grabbed the radio. I told the whole convoy which included all of our Dogs and Ponies that I needed an emergency stop.
At the next exit we pulled this whole convoy off the side of the road. As soon as the HumV was parked I dismounted and sprinted for the shoulder where I proceeded to piss, in uniform, in broad daylight, in front of all of my leadership and half the village of Potterville, a town that lay about 10 miles away from my home town.
When I was done I turned around to find the disbelieving eyes of nearly fifty men staring at me as if I had completely lost my mind. Chief Patrick calmed the moment by getting on the radio and saying “it looks like SPC pee pee is done so we might as well move on.” Oh the laughter.
From that day on I had one name. Can you guess what it was?
But even after my service was over and now I was enlisted in fighting that which I’d been a part of I still found this bladder problematic.
Whenever a scene gets too much for me my bodies first reaction is to flush as much water out of itself as possible. Some people are just born lucky.
Since then I had made Sandy pull his whole rig full of pills over, wasting all that gas and time, so that I could do my thing a few miles into that barren Nebraska yellow. His reaction was similar to my step dad’s when I’d done this to him when we were trying to bond in his cab.
Dave was terrified when I freaked out while we were driving back up to Seattle once when I was hysterical to the point that I jumped out of the car as he was still moving down the on ramp because I couldn’t even wait until the end.
But none of this could compare with the shame of having this issue rear its nasty little face when I was sitting in lecture halls giving speeches to people who had paid money to see me speak.
One night I even had to excuse myself in the middle of my own speech. The audience, packed into the aisles and standing in the doors, well over three hundred in number, found this behavior very funny. I handled it with a nerdish grace.
I believe that was Manchester.
Now, when I watch some of the videos I just laugh when I see myself look around nervously for a few minutes, waiting for things to come to a lull, and when that moment comes I pounce on the opportunity. I get up and leave. Right in front of all of these people and I have the nerve to act like I’m pulling it off. Like nobody is noticing.
Then I return a few moments later. Moazzam was usually telling stories about my condition which would be a soft entrance for me to come back in to play the role of friendly and informative neurotic.
Between each city it was fifty/fifty if we were going to have to stop three or four times. Moazzam occasionally lost his patience during these times. Charlie would turn around and cut me with his white hot Birmingham street wit. Omar would be telling me not to worry.
Part of the problem is that I drink a lot of water. And a lot of coffee. And in between those things I smoke like a chimney. This is not healthy behavior and it definitely contributed to all of the awkward dilemmas that I have detailed above.
But mostly it is my twitchy, nervous body coupled with my complete lack of self control and the oftentimes overwhelmingly anxious chatter of my brain.
Now its just another part of my VA disability claim which reads:
Dear the Army,
I tried to tell you a long time ago that I was crazy and that you should not send me to crazy places because it would probably ruin my life. But you just couldn’t live without me.
Now I pee when I’m nervous and I’m nervous all the time because life feels meaningless ever since you ruined everything for me and a lot of other people so now I’m having trouble having the right kinds of feelings and I keep getting fired because I can’t seem to get my shit together.
Also I have migraines and ringing in the ears. Unless you’ve come up with a means to test for those too, in which case I’ll just take the check for the PTSD.
I don’t know where you could send the check because I am homeless.
Love,
SPC PEE PEE
Unfortunately my claim was recently denied.
I have to go to the bathroom.
a change of heart
September 12, 2010 at 6:09 pm (Chapter Three – Two Sides:One Story) · Edit
Now it gets more difficult.
Sara’s stay in the UK had come to an end. She had been with us for two weeks. We had confided every emotion that had crossed our paths in this time that had been mutually insane and we had become very endeared to one another. I had shared one of my life’s biggest experiences with her. We were the best of friends, but our love had fallen apart. How could it not have? That time was too much.
While we were in a hotel in Birmingham waiting out a winter storm right before she was to go I wrote:
Slept all day today. Had those dreams that only come late in the morning after I’ve already woken up. I know they’re not right but I like them. Things getting fixed. Sorted out. Put in the right place.
Why not? Free stream of concious drug show. Got nowhere else to go anyway. Just keep going. Keep sleeping. Nothing out there.
They are dark. Weird. Dreamt of my old, dead cat. Why? What’s she got to do with any of this? Somebody talking, don’t know who though. Or what they were talking about.
This could go on all day. Done that before. Plenty of times. So I just open up my eyes and the sun was preaching because the clouds were gone. Sara was typing on the floor. Infinite soft clicks pecking off my dreaming. Roll over. One more time.
Then I’m really awake. Sara’s going out. Downtown. Protest today. Too tired of politics. Too tired of moving, talking, explaining, smoking, thinking, all the goddamn time. Staying in today. Maybe read a book. Sara leaves.
She’s been upset lately. Guess I’ve been removed. Distant. Depressed. It happens a lot. Don’t think she can take it. Can’t keep just getting away with “I’m sorry.” Never know what to say, so I try not saying and that doesn’t work either.
Thinking and staring at the hotel wall. Wonder why I act like this? Probably some better way to be.
Stare at the wall a long time then walk around picking things up, seeing what makes me happy but nothing does. So I grab a book without hope that its going to make anything better.
Read for twenty minutes about a fake country and a fake planet made, it is eventually discovered, by people trying to make a stand to God. Fall asleep again. No dreams. Wake up and read more.
Sara knocks on the door. We dance with each other for a few minutes. She asks and I dodge. She looks and I look away. She touches and I flinch away. Leave to get some food. Walk past a bunch of places that would be fine. Need to be alone right now.
All the signs are showing, to me and to her. We both know what’s going on. That’s what makes it hard. Finally find some cheap fish and start walking back to the hotel room with Sara in it.
Eat my fish and watch TV. Eventually roll a spliff and walk downstairs to smoke. When I come back we talk about politics, but its not what I’m thinking about.
Worst part of the year. Every year. Need space but she needs affection. We’re trapped in close quarters, insecure and going crazier together. Every year. Every time.
And then one morning she was gone. That day we visited a WWII POW camp that had been turned into a museum about the history of military detentions. It was cold. I had a styrofoam cup of coffee trembling in my hands. Moazzam and Omar both sympathized with the German soldiers who had been kept here. They didn’t care about national or political affiliation, they bonded on the subject of imprisonment.
That night we drove into Newcastle. We got there really late.
There was a gypsy girl in the audience with magic in her eyes. I had trouble focusing. After the show I was smoking cigarettes as per usual. There were two girls in front of me. One had her back to me. She was talking about the lecture. Her friend kept looking at me nervously. Then she said that she thought I was hot and her friend almost fainted. The girl who was talking figured everything out and turned around. She did a wonderful job of making light of the situation. I was barely uncomfortable.
We talked for a little while and while we were talking I watched the gypsy girl look around for one second only to see me talking to two well dressed college girls. She walked away. I sighed inside of myself. The college girls were asking me if I wanted to drink. Oh, God did I.
I told Moazzam that I was going out for a drink because I hadn’t had one since I’d gotten to England. He looked disapproving because he knew that I would be spending his organizations money on whiskey but I begged him for just this once and he said OK. As long as I was at the hotel and ready to go by ten the next morning so that we could drive to Glasgow.
A few hours later I was in some eighties style loft party watching the girls and the guys split off into two groups to drink themselves stupid before figuring out who was goind to bang who tonight. Before the action started I snuck downstairs to have a cigarette and hopefully leave to find a bar. I didn’t want to see this go down. I accidentally set the alarm off so soon I had a whole group of friends again and we were all smoking. They wanted to leave to go to a bar so I went with them. Some of them had paired off already.
Charlie had warned me when I came to this town. He told me that the women were floozies and that they walk around in miniskirts in the winter. I think he thought that his words would act as a deterrent.
And then there in the streetlights was the gypsy. She was standing with a girl with sharp red hair. They were smoking cigarettes filmishly in the amber of the streetlights. They both lit up to see me. The punk grabbed my arm and said “MALAKA! You were fucking great!” She was Greek and could not hide it. She told me that they had been talking about me and then I came so it must be some kind of fate. I smiled and said that it was ordained under my breath but they didn’t get the joke.
When Vanessa spoke she had a soft voice with a thoroughly entrenched Italian accent. She looked nervous about how she spoke English. Her soft words were strong and well chosen so that she pieced together very poetically intense phrases in a foreign syntax.
Inside of the bar was a large group of people who all looked familiar. Not because I had seen them before, but because they felt like a group of people that I knew or wanted to know.
As it turned out this was the local D.I.Y. crew. In a few moments we were fully bonded over a shared distaste for political movements that didn’t do anything. That is what I love about D.I.Y. It basically says shut the fuck up and DO something. Funny thing to love about it for a guy who talks so much.
They gave me a planner that they had made themselves with an old one color printer. They talked about the movie theatre and cafe that they had built themselves and how they wanted someone to help them build a screen printing studio there because they had some of the equipment already. All the while Vanessa, the gypsy, sat across from me and when our eyes connected it felt like an explosion. I was already in love with her.
We went to another bar. There was a band playing American rock music. We danced. It was Fay, the Greek, CJ, Vanessa and me. When the show was over they told me that I should stay with them because hotels were boring. I couldn’t agree more. Whatever was happening between Vanessa and I seemed to be something that was obvious for everyone except for me who acted like I didn’t understand what was happening. But I did.
She lived in a house typical of the area but totally new to me. It had a woman’s touch, something I had not seen for a long time.
We stayed up together all night. By the time morning came to rip us apart we had a plan. It was a crazy plan, but it was a plan none the less and that is all I need to make as many crazy decisions as possible. We snuck a few last kisses behind a monument across from the hotel and at ten I was walking through the door in a different hoody looking very fucked up. Moazzam was already in the lobby staring at me in complete disbelief. I gave him one apologetic look, went upstairs and brushed my teeth and within the next fifteen minutes we were in the car heading towards Edinburgh.
expatriate
September 12, 2010 at 7:49 pm (Chapter Three – Two Sides:One Story) · Edit
We stopped at Hadrian’s Wall when we crossed into Scotland. The four of us stood around on this thing which divides with all of the clever divides between ourselves. It was timeless because it was made out of stone. It separates one of the greatest Us and Them dramas of the Western World.
I realized that I kept putting myself on the opposite side of this wall from Moazzam and Omar and it hit me for a minute that in a lot of ways there would always be some kind of fence between us. Above us there were only snarling clouds and grimness and I wondered at how horrible it must have been to die here for whatever reason they had given themselves to do so.
We didn’t talk to one another. We just sat in the whipping wind and absorbed the conflict.
I was distracted during the speech that night. My new love story was blotting out the job at hand. I felt disingenuous in front of these people. They came for something that I didn’t think that I could give them and I was ashamed that again I was in the midst of something so big and so important and I was choosing to lose myself in the same labyrinth that I always ran to when things get heavy: love.
I was also sick of divulging myself in front of all of these people. We had done so many speaking events and it was killing me to cut myself down into this soundbite version of myself for countless people, always answering for this thing that only wanted to escape. But then I already knew that there is no escape from that place.
After the show that night I knew that I needed some time to myself. I rolled a few spliffs and went for a long walkabout. I soaked in the age of the city and the madness of its construction. I tried to process the things that were going on with me. I realized that since the walk to the fish shop in Birmingham this had been the first few hours I had had to myself. It felt so good to not have to explain myself to someone for just a few minutes. My body slacked with relaxation and I knew exactly what I was going to do and I came to peace with my situation.
The next morning we were having breakfast with the Dhalai Llama’s ambassador in the ground level flat of the priest who had organized the speech the day before. He was telling us about the current plight of his people. I felt like a child at the table. The men around me were completely invested in the Humanitarian cause but I couldn’t seem to get past my self. I kept my mouth shut and I listened. There was so much to take in on this road.
That night we were in Glasgow. I only remember people standing very close to me and excitedly asking me if I had ever tried a fried Mars bar.
Then for some reason we went back to Birmingham for a few days. I lived by myself in the Ibis hotel that Sara and I used to share. I spent a lot of time sleeping. Some Scandanavian fellow wanted to do an interview with me so I told him to come to the hotel. He showed up and we talked for a while. He was genuinely interested in talking about the tour itself, not Guantanamo Bay. We went for a walk in the snow through the canals. I have never been able to read the article that came out.
Moazzam invited me over to his home for an evening with his family. We sat around and talked for a long time. He seemed to emphasize that there was a plane ticket scheduled for me to leave and I promised him that I would leave while I was looking him square in the eye. We both lost respect for me then because we both knew that I was lying.
That night we watched a movie about the spread of Islam. I knew that Moazzam saw it as a obligation to convert me to Islam and for what it was worth he did, but only in so far as that I can see as much good and as much bad about it as any other religion. I believed that when everything was said and done we both believed in the same thing. We both had ethical codes of conduct though mine was nowhere near as rigid and disciplined as his. I didn’t see why I needed to be a part of the group if I was already being a pretty good Muslim without even trying or calling myself one.
I had even prayed with him and Omar one night in a small Mosque and I heard for the first time the whole thing and a kind of electric shock happened in me. But when the time came to say that there was only one true God and Mohammed was his prophet I said nothing and the spell was broken and Moazzam and Omar both looked disappointed. I had failed the test.
We flew up to Northern Ireland. We were picked up by two big guys. They took us on a tour of all of the murals and places where people had been killed in the struggle for independence here. There were so many conflicts in the world. These men seemed so proud of this conflict. They were historians. Moazzam drew allegories between their wars, especially when we came to the prison camps where IRA members had been kept. We all laughed at the stories of impossible escapes, especially the one where they stole a helicopter, landed it in the prison yard and flew away with a group of IRA big wigs. That deserves a pat on the back.
It was easy to tailor a speech to them that night because they only wanted to hear about anything that would give one more ounce of credibility to their hatred for England and authority in general. And as I said, there was no shortage of parallels.
Then we were back in England and we were heading out to the last speech we would give together. It was in Wales.
There were more than one thousand people there that night. They were mostly students. By now I was so bored of all of the stories that we would tell and the points that we would hit that I didn’t even feel like I was there. I was acting the robot even here in front of all of these people. It went fine. I am a good robot.
Omar began to speak and he told the story about 727 and the lost eyeball and he admitted that he had been detainee 727 and it had been his eye that had been destroyed by the guards during an IRF and so many things that I should have realized before clicked into place. Had this happened in front of me? Did I video tape this, or not video tape this for that matter? Somebody had. Somebody that did the same job I had done. I felt sick.
The questions began. A man came to the microphone. He nervously asked us where we got all of our money from, making a clear indication that it was wrong to profit off of Gitmo. I lost it.
I politely indicated that I would field the question and then sharply told him that I steal food and eat of dumpsters and live out of a bag to do this. I am certainly not a rich man. I told him that if we were rockstars who had come here to give you a different kind of service we would have walked away with thousands and nobody would try to make us feel guilty about it. We barely made enough from this tour just to sponsor it.That is when Moazzam jumped in and told him that his family lived off of the sales of his book which he had to buy from his publisher at half price and then sell to make a profit.
The audience was clapping and cheering. It seemed that they wanted to tear this guy to shreds.
That night we had out last dinner together at a middle eastern restaurant that stayed open for us. We were the only diners. Moazzam caught me smoking a spliff in the deserted back patio. He didn’t make a scene about it, but as always it registered as a great disappointment in his wise eyes.
But the work was done.
I woke up the next morning in a panic. I realized that I didn’t have Vanessa’s number. My train to London was scheduled to leave in a few hours. There was no internet terminal in the hotel so I had to sprint to a hotel a few blocks away, pay them too much money, find the email that she had sent with it, write it down and then rush back to pack up my things and say goodbye to these men who were now a kind of family to me. It was time to find out what happens after this. The next question mark.
It was a strange kind of goodbye. Moazzam and I shook hands and stared into each others eyes and even with the lie there there was still so much respect. Goodbye, my mentor. Until we meet again.
Omar gave me a bear hug and I nearly teared up. He knew where I was going and he had already told me to enjoy myself. He understood.
Charlie also knew. We’d talked about it the night before. He promised me he would not tell Moazzam.
My train left.
A few hours later I was standing on the second floor of the train King’s Cross train station looking for that beautiful pair of eyes and then I saw them and nothing felt crazy any more. We stayed in the Ibis that night and the following morning there was one empty plane seat on its way back to Chicago and two lovers swathed in strange folds of garments, her sleeping on my shoulder, me staring out at the countryside as we passed it by on our way to Newcastle where we were going to be in love.
The Paper Trail 