Ain’t that America.

A short while ago, @HarvardResearch tweeted a story coming out of Children’s Hospital in Boston about a study led by researcher Heather Rosen, MD, MPH, who “found that uninsured children were over three times more likely to die from their trauma-related injuries than children who were commercially insured … Moreover, publicly-insured children were 1.19 times more likely to die from trauma when compared with commercially-insured children.”

“Grandma Julie”

A short while ago I dropped my clothes off at the old school laundromat rusting on the corner at 1500 Pennsylvania Avenue SE. For eighteen Yankee dollars, the good Americans manning the machines there will wash, dry, and fold my every stitch of clothing. I normally give them twenty and tell them to keep the change, but not today. Today’s laundry is abridged to the essential work shirts, boxers, and socks. Nine dollars. I give the attendant a ten dollar bill. “Grandma Julie” is written in cursive blue pen in the top margin the one dollar bill he gives me as change.

Rent is due on the 6th. Saiid wants it by tonight. I nodded last night when he told me, but barring a miracle evening waiting tables the Hawk ‘n’ Dove (which on occation do happen) Saiid will have to wait until the sixth of the month: the agreed upon monthly deadline for rent payments.

Three shifts — tonight, tomorrow night, and Wednesday night — to make or surpass $440. I’m currently sitting on $186 in my back pocket to add to another twenty-or-so dollars in quarters and loose one dollar bills in my backpack. But we’ll low-ball it at $186 for now to avoid the ever-present risks of projections rooted in financial mysteries. This means that my next three days working must produce at least $214 in cash by Thursday, as Saiid owes me $40, despite that he may think otherwise.

“It’ll be ready by five,” said the laundromat attendant; and so I walk to the Pennsylvania Avenue Dunkin’ Donuts on 8th Street for two strawberry-filled and a small coffee lunch.

In the Dunkin’ Donuts’ entryway hang photographs of Barack Obama buying donuts there, here, where I now sit in second floor Free Internet loft, having returned downstairs for another round of donut and coffee — black this time, which was how I asked for it the first time, only to discover some foul milky sugar aggregate during the first sentence or two of this post.

Nevertheless, on both visits to the counter, I paid tribute to the tip mug, as always: one dollar. Tip mugs are one of the many reasons that, despite working seven days a week this month, I now lack sufficient funds to cover rent this month.

Half-Price Burgers

Rent is due on the 6th and I’m short $290. I have four consecutive days waiting tables to breach the deficit, four consecutive days putting the roof over my head at the mercy of the American tipper, along with foreign clientele, who are invariably confused by, and often astonished at, the gamble of it all.

Like a bar, the tables at an American watering hole are real estate the owner employs people at two to three dollars an hour and says, Have at it. In effect, the American batman performs a service that for customers that the proprietor is excused both legally and by society from compensating. “The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense,” writes Dylan. So is the American service industry.

The Great American tipper is a political animal. The Great American barman is a political strategist. The Hawk ‘n’ Dove is a Packers bar, and tonight the Packers play the Vikings at home in Green Bay during Primetime for selling food. But Sunday is an unpopular shift, as the half-price burger is the obvious menu choice.

The Hawk ‘n’ Dove’s burgers are exceptional, and at $4.75, they’re a steal on Capitol Hill; but the better the deal, the lower the bill…

Some people tip a percentage, others tip commensurate with satisfaction, others tip in other ways. Some don’t tip at all. The half-price burger is unfortunate when xcombined with percentage tippers, who unfortunately are not at all uncommon.

Thoughts on Hoder for Suddeutsche Zeitung

Marcos Sanchez & Niklas Hofmann from Germany’s Suddeutsche Zeitung contacted me regarding an article they are writing on Hossein Derakhshan for Monday’s edition. As I don’t expect I’ll be available for a phone or Skype interview tonight or tomorrow: I sent them the following:

My feeling is that Hossein made a tremendous mistake in returning to Iran. Exile is a terrible state in which the afflicted is never again home or whole. My father was exiled from Chile under Pinochet, and after over two decades in the United States, where he has never been accepted as “American”, he returns from Chile periodically to face the stigma of being somehow “less Chilean” than he was before he left.

That said, I still believe that Hossein’s return to Iran was a terrible mistake, as “Editor: Myself” is no longer edited at all, and the Iranian Blogging Revolution he helped catalyze has this year created many questions about the future of digital activism. Thus, foreign scholars, skeptics, and observers give questions answers that Hossein’s perspective, as a the seminal digital Iranian, might have proven to be the most relevant.

As I said, I never met Hossein, and a man’s blog is not necessarily his heart, journey, & soul…but I fail to see the benefit to anyone of his voice being silenced while his countrymen & women continue to assert theirs into a perilously unmapped digital future.

American Graffiti

On a visit to the stall furthest from the entrance to the Library of Congress Jefferson Building’s ground-level men’s bathroom only a moment or so ago, I discovered the following etched into the stall door:

No Rain…please.

This week on Capitol Hill, while our elected employees have barked like a pack of angry seals in quicksand into cable news cameras about a Strong Public Option to the health care reform bill, the weather outside has been rain and autumn gloom.

The Library of Congress’ Jefferson Building, where I now write this post, is approximately equadistant from the Capitol Building and the bar I tend tonight and have been working seven nights of every week since August.

The bar’s proximity to the Capitol makes foot traffic the difference between my ability to earn a living wage every night, or walking home with less cash in my pocket than is worth mugging me for. The latter has been the case all week, and so today’s overcast — pictured above from the aforementioned Jefferson Building’s north patio — makes me nervous, as tonight is Halloween: an otherwise potential firestorm of gratuity and dance music.

Fear & Loathing at the Post Office?

The queue at the Capitol Hill Post Office in the 400 block of Pennsylvania Avenue is long enough to warrant leaving and coming back during my pre-iPhone days, which ended on my birthday a little over a week ago. Now, I don’t mind waiting in line, and blogging the experience in real time —

The married Boomer couple behind me is restless, iPhone-less. “This is bullshit,” mutters the mister. “Yes it is,” agrees the missus.

In the epilogue to Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, the great Hunter Thompson writes that the book is a failed experiment in Gonzo Journalism, which he describes as a first-person journalistic recorded in writing, drawings, recordings, etc., as it happens. Thompson’s failed experiment is a fine American tale; but in our current iPhone era, Gonzo Journalism is at last an actionable method.

America Needs Frances Barrios

Jack Barrios is an American combat veteran of the Iraq War; and, according to the L.A. Times, “[his] wife, 23-year-old Frances, was illegally brought to the United States by her mother at age 6, learned of her status in high school and discovered just last year that removal proceedings have been started. Her possible deportation has left Barrios in panic as he contemplates life without her.”

Few have fared worse in my young American generation than our combat veterans who remain overshadowed by American Idols and Desperate Housewives of Atlanta; and our undocumented immigrants, who boom in the American Dream’s shadows. When husband and wife are vet and undocumented, respectively, what of their children when their mother is deported? Do we at all care that their father is unwell, psychologically maimed following our orders to kill strangers on the other side of the world?

To deport the mother is to necessitate help raising the kiddos. We could hire someone, sure — we the taxpayer could pay someone to raise young Matthew and Allana while their mother remains in Guatemala where surely she deserves to be sent like anyone else who broke the law before she could read the law, or at all.

After all, ignorance to the law is no excuse…even when you’re six years old and mama y papa say it’s okay. And it’s not like she didn’t find out in high school that she’d been a criminal all her life. Like any good citizen, the right thing to do was to turn herself in — and her parents — to Blind Justice.

But Barrios isn’t a good citizen, or a citizen, at all. She’s an undocumented military wife. The latter designation should make the former irrelevant, as any day while Jack was away, a priest might have knocked on her door to tell her that Jack had been killed in a war that never should have been waged in the first place; and that the petulant American public, enraged by Michael Vick’s dogfighting and captivated by Michelle Obama’s wardrobe, no longer notices. That same day, la migra might have raided her home, Jack’s home, and dragged her by the hair in handcuffs away from her children forever.

What then? With the kids at home and Jack at war and Frances returned by force to Guatemala for at least 10 years before she can even apply to return legally, what then?

America needs Frances Barrios, because Jack Barrios needs Frances Barrios. It’s as simple as that. Jack Barrios has earned our every reasonable accommodation; and he’s earned the same for his wife and young’uns too. Failing the Barrios (or Barrioses, as written in the L.A. Times) is a big Fuck You to “The Land of a the Brave” and yet another hard kick square in the throat of “The Home of the Free.”

***

I’ll try and write more on this later on today for posting in the Huffington Post. On Monday I lobbied for Los Barrios on Capitol Hill. I want to make sure they got the message that Los Barrios’ situation is unacceptable, and that the American people should be ashamed to the point of outrage that her deportation was ever even considered.

NOTE: I haven’t yet figured out how to insert links into posts using WordPress 2 for the iPhone. Thus I wrote out the HTML code above linking to LATimes. It was a pain in the ass, so I might be a bit lax with my linking elsewhere until I can figure this one out.

4am

It’s sometime after 4am on misty Capitol Hill and I’m sitting under an umbrella blogging into my iPhone. Taxis roll slowly by on Pennsylvania Avenue and I can feel their drivers’ gazes asking me if I am one of the day’s first or last clients. Shifts change at this hour of the early morning, I’m told. Right now a world of taxistas awaken while another goes to bed. Only the driven drive at 4am: the early birds and the overtimers.

The Dank?

The header is the thing I like least about Azeem Azeez’s White as Milk theme which, as of this posts posting, is the one used fo’ free on this blog, a blog that finally has a title:  The Dank.

The reason I dislike the header is that it creates what I feel is its awkward alignment with the left side of the posts beneath it. I’d either move the Tag Cloud up or move the header left. The header should be bigger and the tag cloud should be more compact and include several more tags. I think a sweet tag cloud would be one that runs the full length of the homepage, regardless of post lengths, adjusting accordingly, showing tags according to their frequency — but in alphabetical order, as the are now.

But that’s neither here nor there…

“The Dank” is a marijuana term meaning “really good shit”. While I’ve heard the term most commonly used in this context in the American Middle West, it has popped up elsewhere in my travels, too. Its relevance to the drug may have something to do with the notion that fine cannabis is moist, sticky (icky-icky), I’m told.

Really good shit is what I hope to post here.  Hence the title.  Whether or not I succeed in doing so depends entirely on too many factors to list, describe, or discuss, so I’ll leave it at that, for now…

WordPress Part Deux on Capitol Hill

WordPress 2 for the iPhone is released on the day I begin blogging with this wonderful little machine. It is a coincidence, sure, but a striking one in that I now carry with me everywhere I go a veritable printing press in my pocket.

But I rarely go anywhere, as I’m already here, for now — Capitol Hill, the center of the universe in 2009: Obama’s first year of very, very expensive Change.

Under these circumstances, carrying with me the power to globally self-publish is a mighty judgement call I will make day in and day out. The consequences of taking it to far could be severe, as I am currently employed at a virtually recession-proof locale where secrets and booze are sold and served together.

The bar is the Hawk ‘n’ Dove on Capitol Hill where I work some nights as a bartender and others waiting tables. “You’re certainly getting a unique view Washington,” laughed an old friend and award-winning newsman over lunch near the Obama White House on Monday…and I agree.

So what then are the lines that I cannot cross here? I write for several hours every day and will only write more with this WordPress part deux in my pocket. Some stories I intend to sell; others, to post here for posterity; and others still, to revisit after time’s great distances have obscured youth’s autobiographical liabilities.

Self-publication is self-regulation; and self-regulation is booms and busts.

Her Hittin’ the Floor, and Me Hittin’ the Clits

She don’t remember shit! Just the two hits!
Her hittin the floor, and me hittin the clits!
Suckin on the tits! Had the hooker beggin for the dick
And your moms ain’t ugly love; my dick got rock quick
I guess I was a combination of House of Pain and Bobby Brown
I was “Humpin Around” and “Jump-in Around”
Jacked her then I asked her who’s the man;
she said, “B-I-G” Then I bust in her E-Y-E.
[Puff Daddy: Yo Big, you're dead wrong.]

One morning last summer I was entering data into my laptop on the campaign trail for then-Senator Obama when my iTunes shuffled forth the song “Dead Wrong” by the Notorious B.I.G. feat. Eminem. As this is one of the most repulsively violent songs I enjoy, I immediately changed it out of consideration for the moral health of what I suspected were kinder ear drums in the office.

Enter Organizing Fellow Britney, the most beautiful black Venus I’ve ever seen, with a smile that didn’t lie, a body that couldn’t lie, and a velveteen melodic voice that was as easy on the ears as the rest of her was on the eyes.

“Ohh why’d you change it…?” she asked.
“Wait, you actually want me to play that song?” I replied.
“Hellll yeah I do,” she sang back with that smile a man can only obey, and so I did.

Every morning after that, then-Senator Obama’s Organizing Fellows arrived at the humble field office on Indianapolis Blvd. (next to the Planned Parenthood), made a strong pot of filthy coffee, and bumped “Dead Wrong” at full volume, for spirit. It became our office anthem, and thus Obama’s anthem, in East Chicago/Hammond, Indiana during the hot mid-summer months of Campaign ‘08.

East Chicago, Indiana | August 2008

Listen to “Dead Wrong” here.

Fast Cars in CVS

On a cigarette run to CVS last weekend, I heard Tracy Chapman’s Fast Cars in the queue. At the time I was with my friend Ken Bemmy and we were both irrefutably hammered. I hadn’t been crunk since July of 2008 — not by choice or necessity, but more out of a general lack of interest.  I was busy OpenCourseWare‘ing through the bleak financial clime at adderall speed, which is much faster than Fast Cars, which I serenaded the CVS cashier with last Saturday during the extremely early morning hours in an off-key spectacle feat. Ken Bemmy.

The cashier dutifully sold us a box of Marlboro Lights; and when we left, Ken & I took to directing traffic with a broken baguette at the intersection of 14th & Harvard Street in Columbia Heights, until a coalition of vagrants and policemen implored us to “Get the fuck out of the street!“

We obeyed, of course, and the next night I returned to CVS & apologized to the cashier for behaving like a sad, horny fratboy in her store.  She claims she doesn’t remember our Tracy Chapman.   Neither does Bemmy.  But tonight the CVS security guard confirmed to me that it happened, as I recount it here; and so my razor sharp memory is absolved.

NOTE: Originally posted in the Open Salon on 7 August 2009

A Drug Dealer with a Cadillac is a Successful Businessman

Last year I was standing outside a checks cash in neglected East Chicago. I was working as an organizing fellow for Obama at the time and my instructions were to register as many voters as I could. The checks cash was on a terrifying corner. Cars packed to the brim with armed gangland stereotypes–both black & Latino–streamed into the parking lot all day. Half of the people in the car would enter the checks cash, the rest would stand (presumably) on guard outside; and then the process would be repeated for those who had originally remained on guard. It was there that I met a young man with the murderer’s tear drop tattooed on the fringe of his eyesocket. I asked him if was registered. He said simply, “Convicted felon.” I asked him if he was off papers. He told me he was not.

As he stood outside watching the street, I asked another group of black men wandering into the cash checks if they were registered. They said they were not. I asked them if they would register. They said they would not. “Nigga why NOT!?!” demanded the tear-dropped black youth, before proceeding with the most eloquent punditry I heard during the election, about McCain’s fiscal policy and Obama’s urban experience, ending with the line, “If you ain’t gon vote, den yo kids ain’t gon’ be nuthin but a hood nigga like me ‘n’ you, son.” Three registered. One was a convicted felon and so could not. I wrote it all down in my notebook and it got me thinking…

The young man was a whirlwind of informed discourse and what our presumptive society would deem a “lost cause.” He was rough as hell around the edges and made no pretenses about his affiliation with a violent lifestyle. My question is, regarding the “merit problem,” when will potent Americans like Obama’s tear-dropped crusader in East Chicago have a place in American classrooms?  Or is it, like he said, that the hope is for the next generation and that his generation is a lost cause?

—

East Chicago grooms many locals with abilities that we, as a society, ought harness. Bold is the hallmark of “ignorant” in the United States. It was bold slaves and hillbillies who followed the drinking gourd and the Oregon Trail. But back then, there was an optimism that has been extinguished in the era of religious devotion to institutional merit. Pres. Obama spoke of “turning your back on your country” by dropping out of school. But public school education equips us with only a diploma, and virtually none of the practical weaponry that can be learned on porches and street corners. “Merit,” it seems, needs to be redefined to acknowledge that the drug dealer with a Cadillac is a successful businessman, and the working single mother of five fed, clothed, & respectful children is an administrative genius, even without an MBA.

—

In my opinion, OpenCourseWare is the best contribution an academic can make to the broader society. Free and accessible lectures, notes, readings, and other materials are the starting point. The next step is to facilitate conversations online like the one we’re having here, but on the open Internet where all can access the discussion threads. Then, the most intelligent & impassioned contributors can be identified and incorporated into research teams in relevant subjects. The final step is in the credentialing process. As the facilitator and moderator of the discussion, academics & researchers will be able to offer sound guidance to schools and/or employers about applicants based on their remote contributions. Admittedly, what I’m suggesting here is imperfect, but it could work as a way to use the Internet to address the merit problem.

NOTE: Excerpted from my comments on Melissa Harris Lacewell’s Facebook wall regarding Lane Guinier’s address at the State of the Black Union.

iPhone blogging test

This post is for testing my iPhone’s capacity to blog through the free WordPress ap:

LittleSis-type Site for Collaborative Family History Networks?

Only moments after I began seriously using it, it occurred to me the LittleSis site was sweet. I sent note or two at one of the dudes there to let him know. I don’t remember which one and the Internet’s down right now but he knows who he is, and hopefully he’ll see this post, which I’ll tweet @ several tweeters when the Library of Congress opens at 8:30 and I’m again online.

A few months ago, I wrote Jon Philips about a collaborative family history building Wiki. He agreed that the idea was not unreasonable. But the fact of the matter is that I don’t enjoy building Wikis anywhere near as much as I do LittleSis. As it becomes a web of affiliations, it becomes a web of endless stories and unanswered questions. It seems to me that the only thing a blank LittleSis-like site would need to be a potentially robust collaborative family history building platform is modified data entry prompts.

UPDATE: The Internet returns!

хранить вечно

Writes Viktor Mayer-Schönberger: “хранить вечно“ (to be preserved forever) the KGB stamped the dossiers on its political prisoners. The Communist state would never forget the identity, believes, actions and words of those that had opposed it.

Like the Soviet state, Google does not forget. But unlike the Soviet Union that ceased to exist fifteen years ago, Google has become an indispensable tool for hundreds of millions of people around the world, who use it every day.3 We seem to have accepted that our digital society may forgive, but no longer forgets.

Chileno-Gringo

On Wednesday, I returned from four days in O’Fallon, Missouri — my hometown — where my youngest brother showed me the video above that he’d recorded on Direct TV from Televisión Nacional, Chile’s government-run PBS-equivalent.

My ear only translates about 35% of the tune, which is titled Candombe de José — my father told my lil’ bro that Chilenos shorten the title to El Negro José — and I haven’t the patience right now to deal with the lyrics sites. Nevertheless, Candombe… is yet another song from the censored cassette tapes my father snuck out from ‘neath Pinochet’s boot in 1985. I know it’s every note, and can hum along with a casual phonetic precision.  It is at once a tune I know by heart and a song I’ve never really heard.

A Chilean-Missourian lives in a world of explanations and semi-recognitions.  Missourians are quick to note that I “don’t look like a Pablo,” which is to say that I don’t look, sound, or act “like a Pablo”, as any foreignness in my presentation would explain my Chilean name.  But it’s hard to attach a label to someone to doesn’t fit the ordinary role.  My friends in Missouri don’t refer to me as “that Chilean guy”.  They refer to me as “Pablo”.  Strangers may inquire. (“What is he Mexican or something?”)  Nope…from Chile.  (Often followed by: “Where’s that?”)

In Chile, it is apparant to all that I don’t sound Chileno, that my castellano is accented.  ”He doesn’t sound like a Pablo…” However, they can rarely place my accent until I tell them that my mother es gringita.  Then it is suddenly obvious.  Several Chileans have remarked that I sound a lot like Sean Connery.

I’ve noticed in the past that Chileans of current generations are used to meeting young Chileans with accents. We are, as it were, Generación Exiliado — Generation Exiled, to France, Sweden, Cuba, Argentina, Germany, England, the United States, etc. United States of Americans too are becoming re-accustomed to accented youth from all parts of the world, and especially from Latin America.

Nevertheless, my experience as one in the vanguard generation of the immigrant wave to the United States, and of Chile’s generation of exiles has overall been advantageous in that I’ve never had to establish my identity apart from anyone else.  I’m Pablo — the Missourian from Chile; el Chileno-Gringo. You’ll not meet another.

Tap Water Gives Catholic Student Herpes

Last night, the local news ticker noted that Catholic University in Washington, D.C. is constructing the largest solar panel capability in the district. A short while later, I ran into three friends from Catholic whom had heard the news. None were enthused.

“Yeah, I heard,” said the Floridian, “and there’s a ton of shit the school should be spending money on before they do the solar thing.”

Like what?

“…like the nasty-ass water that comes out of the faucets,” replied the Floridian.” I laughed, but his classmates looked grim.

“That’s no joke, man,” said the weightlifter. “I started out drinking the water just normal…out of the tap, and my mouth filled up with canker sores.”

Seriously?

“Oh yeah,” he continued. “It wasn’t until I got one of those Brita filters that my mouth cleared up and the sores went away.”

While I didn’t pursue the subject any further with the students, I couldn’t help but ponder Catholic’s decision. On the one hand, one could argue that solarizing the university benefits the whole of humanity by reducing its facilities’ emission of pollutants (its “carbon footprint”?). But on the other hand, either making the necessary improvements to the university’s water supply or purchasing enough Brita filters for students affected by the water supply’s shortcomings promotes the student body’s well-being. This, in turn, could have several affects that also benefit the whole of humanity. For example, reducing (or even, eliminating) the risk of water-borne maladies augments the individual and collective academic potential of Catholic’s student body. That is, my friend’s mouthful of herpes was a districting discomfort that bred a fearful preoccupation that it seems reasonable to assume could be distracting. If reading Goethe weren’t already a hurdle for the average American attention span, reading Goethe thirsty with a fresh corrosive virus feasting on your gums and inner-cheek seems likely to be even more-so.

The point here is that it benefits a society to optimize the conditions for its students to absorb and engage with their respective coursewares. This can be especially true at the university level where many students develop the foundational knowledge and skills they need to assimilate into the employment world, where they are (ostensibly) charged with producing, maintaining, or improving something. Since Catholic University’s most-important function is outputting competent, moral alumni contributors to society (read: to the whole of humanity), should the university improve its tap water before building its solar energy supply?  Which is the moral choice here?

The Victory in Little Lebanon

In September of 2004, I moved into a flat off Edgware Road in London’s Little Lebanon and worked behind a bar at a pool hall pub for Arab gangbangers and kingpins, swinging the occasional sterling surge promoting high-end night clubs as partner-in-crime to a Palestinian diplomat’s flamboyant primogeniture.

At the pool hall pub, Saudi engineers with PhDs from Berkley and CalPoly, fresh from the desert and building what was becoming Dubai, came in to talk in Arabic to the proprietor, my boss, a tiny Sudanese lion in a real Versace suit with a fake Versace belt & buckle. He wore that same belt & buckle every day I saw him and had a Versace (and only Versace) suit for every day of the work week, but not a sixth or seventh that he did not need. His Russian wife, Anya, bought him the fake belt & buckle from a street vendor on their honeymoon to St. Petersburg to visit her parents when they were still a young married couple starting out poor.  But they were not poor by the time I met my boss. By then, he was a borough kingpin, arguably the borough kingpin, as his was the unassailable Central West London real estate trade. W1H. He went by Ernest Joseph, but I later found out that the name his father gave him back in the Sudan was not Ernest Joseph.

Ernest bought the The Victory the summer before I arrived in London to study abroad for a school year. He needed a place to talk at night with out-of-towners in Arabic. While Ernest closed the deal on the pub, I was employed as a full-time prep cook alongside battered white waitresses, illegal busboys & dishwashers, and parolee heroin pushers at a Cracker Barrel off Highway 40 in O’Fallon, Missouri. I saved every penny that summer, the summer before London, but pennies aren’t sterling and I arrived staring down the barrel at nine months on the British Pound with 1,800 US dollars hidden away in a Twain novel, and no line for cash stateside, utterly untraveled, unnetworked, dressed like a Missouri clearance rack, and desperate for an income.

The Victory was the shadiest place I’d walked into in three weeks of walking into every place it made sense to beg for a job. At the time, the pub was in the midst of a renovation that would make it a respectable-looking gastro-place with potted real plants and a Chelsea flag above the door on game day. But on that night in September of ‘04, I arrived to low-lit drywall with plaster pokadots smeared over the heads of nails and screws. The Bush & Blair’s invasion of Iraq was well-underway and unpopular on the modest flat-screen BBC broadcast high on the wall. I could hear the clack! of a pool table and make out the silhouettes of at least a half-dozen of the Arab world’s Daddy Yankees through the atmospheric stew of nicotine abuse that authenticates an American bowling alley. Through the stew I spotted something shiny and golden and moving. Hair.  A blond.  A Polish Venus from Lublin.  Aga.

“Y’all hiring at all?” I asked.
“vWhat?“
“Are you hiring…at all?”
“Oh, I see. You mast speak weeth Ernest,” said Aga, short for Agnieshka, purring the “Er” in the bossman’s name like a Bond Girl who doesn’t know or care that she’s the first Bond Girl you’ve ever met.

Ernest asked me four hours of questions over four hours of Carlsberg pints. He also changed my name to “Bob,” because he could not pronounce “Pablo.” Two months later, when I turned 21, he would buy me a birthday pint of Guinness and a birthday shot of tequila, pull my forehead firmly to his forehead, look me hard in the eye and declare with Carthaginian thunder, “I like you Bob! Because you ask me for a job!”

Something in my step the night I met my first Bond Girl reminded Ernest of the kid who wasn’t called Ernest when he first arrived in Her Majesty’s London alone, with no line for cash home, utterly untraveled, unnetworked, dressed like a refugee camp, and desperate for income. Ernest would later tell me about his father’s liquor store in the Sudan, but it might have been a bar. He was drunk as Pap Finn that night, the only time I saw him so, and squinting through chain-smoke at a terpsichorean mirage of himself…and his father…and some place that in some way exchanged booze for money to thirsty Sudanese a long time ago.

But while the mirage in his meandering eyes was vague, I could see his memory was vivid, lucid, and dire. An exile’s memory is a brilliant opaque of irreverent solitude where imagination’s nightmares thrive. While an immigrant is never again home, the exiled is never again whole. I am an immigrant. My father was exiled. Ernest Joseph was exiled by his own father who sold the place where he once sold booze to buy a one-way to Her Majesty’s Heathrow and put 20 pounds sterling in the kid who would become the kingpin Ernest Joseph’s hand, and said, “You will never see me again. Accept this and do not return. Become a success.”

Ernest never saw his father again, and sat beside me then with tears in his eyes he did not see, but felt when one dropped from his eyelash to splash on a pronounced, North African cheekbone. The tear was the mirage, and he was suddenly sober. He quickly wiped it away with his knuckle and I quickly pretended not to notice. Then he rose in faux triumph and declared “I must pees,” and stumbled to the bathroom to pees.