Most Definitely Can't Go Home Again

Paul Bowles (Sheltering Sky) says the difference between a tourist and a traveler is that a tourist thinks about going home the moment he or she arrives somewhere. A traveler, on the other hand, might not ever go home again.

Before going home a couple of years ago with tales to tell and a head full of delusions which, at the time, I mistook for hopes and dreams, I was a fence sitter on this question of tourist or traveler.

Now, home for me is in Kuwait and soon I will travel to Saudi Arabia which will be my away from home. What used to be home for me ain't there no mo'. The levees broke and brackish lake water in cahoots with the Mississippi drowned the place I called home.

Will I be happy in Saudi? Can't say. I can't define the word. I can try to illustrate it.

If the afterlife is anything life the movie, "Afterlife" where the dead arrive in heaven and after a few days of adjusting to not being alive, they're asked to identify their most cherished memory, then I might be able to tell you what happiness is or has been for me.

First off--at one time, I would have had a quick answer. Happiness is getting some. But due to the nature of this so-called disease I have--this obsession of the mind combined with an allergy of the body, especially to a substance known as ethyl alcohol, an allergy of craving more, more more, more. . . well, that's what's sort of ruined getting some for me. I've gotten a lot. Too much. So I can't say that fucking is synonymous with happiness. It's still fun. But so is ice cream. So are fish sticks.

I digress.

Heaven, in this movie Afterlife, the first stage in the process of death is to arrive in an independent movie studio set up in a decaying, abandoned high school where production staff of angels try their best to recreate a cheesy reproduction of the most cherished memory for the newly arrived dead. Once the dead experience the reproduction of this moment of bliss, they can move on to Nirvana or some such after-after life.

A cherished moment is a happy moment--I'll go with that.

It's 1979. I'm in North Miami. My girlfriend's parents live there. Her parents have taken us to Tony Roma's. We order pork baby-back ribs (the Rand's weren't kosher), an onion mum, and we drink a couple of rounds of happy hour glasses of white wine.

The bill arrives. The second round of wine costs regular price. The bill is four or five dollars more than my girlfriend's father, Jerry Rand, had expected to pay.

We'd ordered the wine a minute or two before the cut-off time, before the end of happy hour. The waiter had turned in the order late. Not our fault. The bartender rang up full price. So a small tiff erupts between Jerry--my girlfriend's father and our waiter. The waiter--most likely a Jew himself--glared while Jerry made his POINT! and was probably thinking, "What a Jew!"

Jews can call other Jews "Jews" much the same as only a black can call another black a nigger.

Jerry was a man I really admired. He was an old school New York Jew, Catskill vacations, Ishkabibel and all that Yiddish jazz. He'd seen Billie Holiday perform in a kosher deli in Brooklyn. The deli closed up on Fridays for the Sabbath and let some less devout members of the tribe rent out the place, set up a small stage area around the tables and sell set-ups.

Jerry had been a gunner on a Super Fortress, and I knew he'd been through the shit because he never wanted to talk about the meat of his experience, battles, death, fear, bliss--he only remembered that the flights took off too early in the morning, the distance to the target areas were too far, the flights were uncomfortable and boring--most of the time--and he mostly remembered being cold and sleepy. I had to infer that he'd experienced brief moments of sheer terror, the kind that only guys who hadn't been through it are more than happy to claim as their war stories.

So--the waiter got the manager and the manager apologized and said he'd e right back with a new bill and a discount.

Lori glared at her father. He was going to make us late for a movie or something. He was causing a scene. He was stereo-typing the tribe. He caught her glare and said this, "Hey, five dollars looks a hell of a lot better in my pocket than theirs!"

Yup. That's my cherished memory, the one I'd want to relive. I was running with the tribe and watching 1,000 years of diasporic suffering unfold in a chain restaurant in North Miami in a single, unforgettable, inimitable moment.


However, on the other hand, I hope that I am never confronted with having to choose a most cherished moment. I mean, there are others. Smoking pot and watching Mystery Science Theater with Char in the early nineties. Getting as JPEG of my daughter in an Email--she was seventeen and I'd never set eyes on her. Jumping 75 feet from a footbridge over a river in a Sri Lankan jungle, landing in a bed of leeches and knowing that this was what made me a traveler, not a tourist.

Coming home from the British Council last month after teaching 10 contact hours three days back-to-back and finding a that the Rose of Tehran had made me bowl of ice cream with cookies and whipped cream.

Shit! I can't choose. What should I say? "This is the moment. Right now. Here in the fleeting, temporal present. This is my most cherished moment.

It could turn on a dime. Tomorrow I could find myself in some place where putting a bullet in a white boy is better than happy hour wine and baby back ribs.

I need to work a better program.