Home Boy Read online

  “You remember,” AC was saying, his stentorian voice carrying over the noise, “about twenty years ago, bands of Afghans battled the Red Army? Yeah, well, they were called rebels, freedom fighters—Mujahideen—the Holy Warriors. They fought with World War II rifles till we armed them with AK-47s and Stingers. We invited them to Washington and, ah, compared them to the Founding Fathers. They were the good guys, chum. Osama B. was one of them.”

  When AC paused to take a dramatic drag, I tapped him on the shoulder. Turning around with a start, he exclaimed, “Ah! There you are!” A lock of hair fell over his prominent forehead; he had the air of somebody doing many things at once, focused yet distracted, more juggler than ringmaster. “Listen,” he said, putting his arm conspiratorially around me. “We need to talk.”

  “Is this about Jimbo?” I asked. “Because you know he can always crash with me.”

  “It’s not that—”

  “You were saying,” the Bombaster interrupted.

  “I was saying,” AC continued without missing a beat, “after the Mujahideen defeated the Soviets, they turned their guns on each other. Nobody remembers now, but tens of thousands died, Kabul was razed to the ground, and something like three to four million refugees left for Pakistan. Afghanistan, in effect, ceased to be a state, but by then everybody had lost interest in the region, in—if I remember correctly—what some guy in the administration called ‘the obscure Afghan civil war.’ You follow, chum?”

  The Bombaster nodded intently. AC blew his nose into a cocktail napkin, then turning to me, announced, “We need to sit down, like, ah, civilized human beings. We have plans to discuss that require consideration and quiet, but it’s a zoo in here. We’re headed to Jake’s.”

  Before I could open my mouth—What plans? Why Jake’s? Why now?—AC had returned to grand themes and a rapt audience: “Then the Mujahideen’s progeny emerged, the Taliban, the Bastards of War! You know when they swept through Afghanistan, they were garlanded, hailed as heroes? You see, they brought order for the first time in decades. But soon the proverbial shit hit the fan. They outlawed music, TV, fun. They hacked off limbs, shot women, blew up the goddamn Buddha of Bamiyan! Now they’ve, ah, transmogrified into the villains of modern civilization, but you know, they’re not much different from their fathers—brutes with guns—except this time they’re on the wrong side of history.”

  Pleased with being privy to the imperatives of wild men and the goings-on in far-flung arenas of the world, the Bombaster asked, “What’re you drinking?”

  “A double Wild Turkey, please, with a drop of water,” he replied before informing me, “We leave right after.”

  “I, um, need to find somebody,” I said weakly.

  Turning around, the Bombaster asked, “So lemme get this straight: you guys aren’t Indian?”

  “We’re too handsome, chum! You can call us Metrostanis! Cheers! Skål! Adab!”

  Shoving off, I said, “I’ll meet you there, yaar.”

  “Ooay!” AC called, as if hailing a rickshaw in Karachi traffic. “This is serious.” Then fixing me with a look meant to convey consequence, he yelled, “I’ll be waiting.”

  Impelled, I parted the crowd like a man on a mission, circled the bar several times, and checked each and every booth and the restrooms in the back for good measure, but the Girl from Ipanema eluded me. As I knocked about, I began wondering what I would say if I ever found her, then the martinis became molten in my empty stomach. Feeling insubstantial and sick, I decided it was time to leave, but as I turned, I found myself face-to-face with a vision. “Ciao, ciao,” I blurted, my heart beating like techno.

  “¿Que?”

  “Bow, wow?”

  “Jou are like puppy dog?”

  “Well,” I replied, “I like to think, more like a wolf.” In an effort to elucidate, I growled unconvincingly and, summoning the rudimentary Spanish I’d picked up watching Telemundo, added, “El loco.”

  “Jou are craysee?”

  “I mean el lobo, el lobo!”

  “¡El lobo! ¡Ha! ¿Habla español?”

  “I can learn,” I muttered to myself.

  “¿Que?”

  “Are you, um, Argentine?”

  “No!” she cried, feigning offense. “I am of Venezuela.”

  “Of course you are.”

  “How jou know?”

  “Because,” I replied with the astonishing fluency of a regular playboy, “you’re so very beautiful.” The blandishment caused her eyelids to flutter and look away as if to allow me a moment to scrutinize her up close. And in the blink of an eye I discerned the tiny, freshly bleached hairs on the edges of her pout, the slight dimple in her chin, and God’s finishing touch, a crescent-shaped mole on her collarbone. In the blink of an eye, I was smitten. It didn’t take much. Although I aspired to be cavalier about women, unlike AC I couldn’t manage trysts in toilets, necking in cabs, the protocol of metropolitan courtship. In the four years I had been in the city, in the twenty-one and a half years that comprised my life, I fell in love routinely. It went almost entirely unrequited.

  When I offered to buy her a drink, a mojito, ¿si? she said que rico and repeated the query with an inflection suggesting agreement. It was a fortuitous, unexpected development, a boon. Emboldened, I grabbed her hand, tugging her to the bar where I organized refreshments.

  The Girl from Ipanema spoke in a low gurgle, but even though we were close enough to kiss, I managed to miss the meat of the conversation because I was busy marveling at her bubblegum lips. And though her accent was thick and her command of the language poor, I did glean that her family had emigrated in the not-so-distant past, a decision informed by the resurgent populist neosocialism sweeping South America, in particular the radical land-redistribution policy and thuggery of the present regime: “They take all Papa’s houses. We are leaving. We are American.” I found myself thinking that if I married her, I too would become a bonafide American. In a sense, we were peas in a pod, she and I, denizens of the Third World turned economic refugees turned scenesters by fate, by historical caprice. That’s when I thought I heard her say, “Jou haf nice ass.”

  Staring blankly, I considered the compliment, uncertain whether I had misheard or she had misspoken, whether this was how courtship worked in Caracas—the jaunty etiquette of a warm-blooded people—or whether it was a local matter, something to do with the phenomenon of “terror sex” reported in newspapers and periodicals. As I tried to formulate a becoming reply, something gracious and witty, she brushed my eyelids. “Oh!” I exclaimed, “My eyes! Thank you! Thank you very much.” She asked me where I’m from, and when I told her, she said, “Jou not Italian?” I scratched my ear, she sucked her lips to smoothen the cracks in her lipstick, and then we wordlessly observed the bartender crush mint leaves with a fork in two tall glasses before us. Adding sugar, lime juice, rum, he topped each with club soda, crushed ice, and a garnish of lemon crescents.

  “Gracias,” the Venezuelan said smilingly.

  “De nada,”the bartender replied, grinning impishly.

  “Bueno,” I chimed in.

  “Now,” the Girl from Ipanema announced, “I go to toilet,” before sashaying away for the second time that night. At that fraught moment, I didn’t know whether to stay put or follow, whether she needed a Kleenex, a bump, or simply had to relieve herself. Regardless, I should have called out “Wait!” or “Come back!” or something like that, and later, when reviewing the episode in my mind, I recalled things to say, funny things, bold things, things men say to woo women, but just then I stood there dumbly, my hands flopping at my side. It was as if my reservoir of cool had run dry. It was time to leave. I demanded the check with a vigorous scribble in the air and settled the tab.

  The Bombaster carried on: “We’re going down, but it ain’t what you think it is. There’s this DOD report that says that WMD aren’t the biggest danger to humanity. It’s nature, man! Global warming, Noah’s second flood, coming at ya! You think New York’s going to last?
You think we’ll survive? Un-an! We’ll all become God’s goldfish, baby …”

  The doors closed on vulgar music, distant drums. Tribeca, stricken, was deathly quiet, a ghost town. The streets were empty and strewn with the usual garbage. I hurried past closed doors and shuttered entrances, farther and farther away from disaster, thinking this is what it feels like to be the last man on earth. Turning into West Broadway, there was the suggestion of civilization in the porters loitering outside the Soho Grand, the couple tentatively crossing an empty street, a squatting bum. There were, however, no cabs anywhere. The blocks between Canal and Houston seemed longer than usual, probably because there was a certain urgency in my stride, as if I already knew that years later, in retrospect, that night would stand out in the skyline of my memory.

  2.

  We who arrived in the West after the colonial enterprise, after our forefathers, heroes, icons—the likes of Syed Ahmed Khan, Mulk Raj Anand, and M. A. Jinnah—found the east coast of the Atlantic habitable if not always hospitable, but America was something else. The weather was mostly friendly, the people mostly warm, and the premise of the nation, the bit about “your bruised and battered” (or as AC put it in his native Punjabi, “twaday tootay-phoothay”), was an altogether different thing; you could, as Mini Auntie told me once, spend ten years in Britain and not feel British, but after spending ten months in New York, you were a New Yorker, an original settler, and in no time you would be zipping uptown, downtown, crosstown, wherever, strutting, jaywalking, dispensing directions to tourists like a mandarin. “You see,” you’d say, “it’s quite simple: the city’s like a grid.”

  The theoretical premise of America had more tangible implications. You did not, for instance, have to explain yourself. Learning I was “foreign,” my college roommate, Big Jack (a native of a place called Bangs, TX), inquired, “Ain’t that in South America?” Testament to the theory of symbolic interaction, perhaps, it didn’t matter, because “it’s not where you’re from,” as Rakim once averred, “it’s where you’re at.” Sure, they said institutionalized racism was only a few generations old and latitudinally deep, but in New York you felt you were no different from anybody else; you were your own man; you were free. At any given minute, you could decide to navigate your way up Fifth Avenue to regard shiny luxury watches in shop windows, eat a kosher hot dog on Central Park South, or read Intro to Sociology at an outdoor café off Christopher.

  And sure, independence had its dark dimensions, its lonely frequented loci, like a scarred green bench in the northwest corner of Washington Square where nobody sought you out. You would turn up your collar then, and sit with your arms folded regarding the masquerade. You were no different from the next man: bum, pot dealer, panhandler, booted malcontent sprouting gelled spikes like lacquered weeds from his head. New York could be a lonely place, but over the course of a year, these places became fewer and farther between.

  There was AC’s cluttered cove in Hell’s Kitchen, a fantastic and fecund place somewhere between Barbarossa’s private quarters and a fin-de-siècle boomtown brothel, featuring burgundy wallpaper, wall-to-wall rugs, velvet curtains cut from Salvation Army dresses, a hammock, a filthy aquarium, a bonsai collection, and shelves upon shelves of books. There were books in piles on the floor, Toynbee’s twelve volumes in the bathroom, and the Critique of Pure Reason propped up a wobbly, termite-ridden foot of the dining table. There was junk everywhere. The pièce de résistance, a functioning fountain of a pissing cherub with a chipped nose, salvaged from an estate sale, was garlanded with strings of sewn jasmine on special occasions like Thanksgiving, Christmas, 14th August, Eid. AC’s landlord, a reformed slumlord, was on his case for the usual reasons—noise, late rent, no rent, no fountains allowed—but also because AC had altered the layout of the fifteen-hundred-plus-square-foot railroad apartment by erecting walls, compartmentalizing the space into a library, bar, sehen, and a random area bathed in blue mood lighting called the Blue Room. “This is my place in the world,” he insisted. “I’ll do with it as I please.” Later I would be over, reading, playing speed Scrabble or Texas hold ’em, watching flicks from AC’s collection (variously labeled Korean Action Movies, Movies w/Madeleine Stowe), or dabbling in homemade hallucinogens. During my freshman year, however, I had only been over once because AC was a man possessed then, working till six every morning on his dissertation, which he brazenly proclaimed would change the “contours of modern discourse.”

  Consequently, I frequented AC’s sister’s place, where there was always “somebody if not somebody else over” and you were welcome “whenever.” There was also the promise of a meal at the end of the entrance corridor, past the Damascene brass lamp, the colonial-era lithographs, and the silver-framed mirror in which you’d check the parting of your hair. If she wasn’t attending to a patient downstairs, Mini Auntie presided in the dining room like the Oracle at Delphi, her large gray eyes peering into your consciousness as you walked in. “You must eat something, child. You’re cadaverous! What would your mother say if she saw you now?” If you were lucky, she’d warm up a plate of killer nihari, transporting you home, to Burns Road. Otherwise, you’d be treated to homemade pizza or a shami-kabab-and-butter sandwich. You’d also be treated to lectures on politics, love, life, the institution of marriage. “Find a girl, child, and love her. Don’t break any hearts. Mark my words: it’ll come back to you.” After divorcing her husband, a “good and proper chamar,” she fled Lahore to find her calling in pediatrics and the city. A small woman, she had subsequently been reincarnated as Mini, a one-word moniker, like Madonna, and like Madonna, she was a one-woman institution, a pillar of the city’s expatriate Pakistani community. To us, children of her pals back home, she was a foster mother, especially as she had not produced progeny herself.

  During my senior year, Mini Auntie’s was displaced by the Duck’s. The Duck lived in a swank corner apartment overlooking West Broadway, her parents’ pied à terre in the city. They had another one on Fishers Island and, as far I knew, one in Aix-en-Provence. Her father’s people had reportedly landed on Plymouth Rock and drifted down the coast to New Canaan, Connecticut, while her mother’s mother hailed from blue-blooded French stock, though they didn’t seem to take such things very seriously. The Duck certainly didn’t. She would be at the door when we arrived, beckoning with extended arms, fingers clutching the air. She would hug, tug, seat us, and depending on the occasion or the time of day, pour us brandy, port, grappa. It was as if she instinctively knew what you needed. All the while the Duck’s dog—a gray terrier with long silky hair and tiny black eyes—would sniff and bark like a drag queen. “C’mon, Lyman,” she’d say, patting her thighs. “Be nice, be polite.” Turning to her guests, she’d say, “You’re meeting special people tonight, people without whom New York’s not New York! These are the famous Pakistanis!” She had a talent for introductions. In her apartment we met the veritable who’s who of the city, from heiresses who wore no underwear to graying men with sharp features who would engage you with rarified lisps. And just as you were talking about the hot new band that was performing at Badlands or the Hammerstein Ballroom, they would turn up for a nightcap, manager and groupies in tow, a little tired, a little sweaty but, because of the Duck’s hospitality, quickly recharged and ready to go. There’d be great revelry, epic celebration into the night. And before retiring, at six or seven in the morning, before that creeping bittersweet feeling that the world is quite wonderful but your time on it is finite, you would have breakfast with rockstars.

  When there was no place to go, there was Jake’s. We weren’t sure whether Jake’s was legit—the secrecy Jake cultivated seemed contrived, and, we mused, the authorities must have wind of it—but it certainly had the facade and the ambience of a speakeasy. There was no sign or other indication that the large black door—often mistaken for a service entrance—led to dingy quarters that accommodated a pool room and bar. The pool room was so narrow that you could not get at the pool table from the one side witho
ut deploying the bridge, and the felt on the table was so scratched that trick shots were de rigueur. Many a night the uninitiated got hustled playing nine ball, not just nickeled-and-dimed but properly Benjamin Franklined.

  A single green bulb revealed the alcove between the two rooms where we’d hang back, circumscribed by two chairs jammed together to form a love seat, a threadbare ornamental ottoman, a coffee table crudely rendered from a tree stump. Other artifacts embellished the area: a triangular construction sign featuring horizontal zigzags, a globe of the world circa Bismarck’s Wars of Unification, a set of framed Harvester butterflies (the only known North American carnivorous species, which, Jake would tell you, “will bite your head off, guy”), a wizened, oversize, wide-rimmed top hat nailed to the wall. As you’d expect, each item had an accompanying story that changed with each recitation. It was an impressive display, a lifetime’s worth of clutter.

  Jake would be perched on a stool at the near end of the bar, beside a small black-and-white TV with a V-shaped antenna. Gaunt, silver-haired, and raspy-voiced, Jake entertained in a crisp white shirt revealing the meager curls on his chest and a handsome dark blazer that usually sprouted a black rose. Although he cut the figure of a capo, he assumed the persona of a pimp if you arrived with a ladyfriend. Beckoning from the back, he would demand an introduction and a kiss on the lips; then producing a disposable Kodak from his jacket, he would instruct you to “step back, guy, ’n’ take a snap.” Hundreds of pinned pictures featuring Jake with his skeletal arm around simpering women adorned the wooden lattice separating the alcove from the bar.

  The bar was rudimentary and opened onto a hallway that did not seem to be used by the tenants of the converted brownstone off Bowery. At the end of the passage was a standing-room-only toilet where we did blow. There was an open courtyard behind the bathroom where you were not permitted to loiter but that you had to traverse on your way out. You entered through one door and exited through another, and if you didn’t follow protocol, Jake would throw you out, yelling, “Bruttoor!” “Cattivo!” “NO ROOM FOR YOUS!” There wasn’t much room anyway: you never found or could fit more than seven or eight people inside. It was a secret shitty little place, a clubhouse for the dissolute, the disconsolate.