motionless. If I moved at all, I did so like a straddler standing clueless on a wobbly raft in the rapids; the raft moved, the water moved, but I did not.
I envied him. I wanted to learn from him. He was a man. I wasn’t sure what I was. He was the voice, the missing link to my past, the person I might have grown up to be had life taken a different turn. He was savage; I’d been tamed, curbed. But if you took me and dunked me in a powerful solvent so that every habit I’d acquired in school and every concession made to America were stripped off my skin, then you might have found him, not me, and the blue Mediterranean would have burst on your beach the way he burst on the scene each day at Café Algiers.
In another country, another town, other times, I would never have turned to him, or he given me the time of day. I was not in the habit of approaching a complete stranger, would never have done so had I not seen something of me in him, something muted and forgotten in me that I recognized right away when it flared in his speech. His rants, for all their distorted, senseless dyspepsia, spoke to me, took me back to my past, the way Café Algiers took me back to something distant, unnamed, and overlooked in myself.
He, I would soon find out, was the only other human being in Cambridge who not only had not seen Star Wars but who refused to, who deplored it, who scorned the cult that had suddenly sprouted around it that summer. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker were on everyone’s lips as though they were familiar characters in a Shakespeare play, with R2-D2 and C-3PO trailing like minor fools and obsequious courtiers. But for Kalaj, it stood for all that was jumbo-ersatz.
ONE OF THE things that drew me to Kalaj at first had nothing to do with his mischievous sixth sense, or his survivor’s instincts, or his cantankerous outbursts that had strange ways of wrapping their arms around you till they choked you before they turned into laughter. Nor was it the mock-abrasive intimacy which put so many off but was precisely what felt so familiar to me, because it brought to mind those instant friendships of my childhood, when one insult about your mother followed by another about mine could bind two ten-year-olds for a lifetime.
Perhaps he was a stand-in for who I was, a primitive version of the me I’d lost track of and sloughed off living in America. My shadow self, my picture of Dorian Gray, my mad brother in the attic, my Mr. Hyde, my very, very rough draft. Me unmasked, unchained, unleashed, unfinished: me untrammeled, me in rags, me enraged. Me without books, without finish, without a green card. Me with a Kalashnikov.
If I liked listening to him, it was not because I believed or even respected the stuff he mouthed off every day at Café Algiers, but because there was something in the timbre and inflection of his words that seemed to rummage through a clutter of ancestral fragments to remind me of the person I may have been born to be but had not become. If I didn’t take his daily rants against America seriously, it was because it was never really America he was inveighing against, nor was his the voice of a bewildered Middle East trying to fend off a decaying and implacable West. What I heard instead was the raspy, wheezing, threatened voice of an older order of mankind, older ways of being human, raging, raging against the tide of something new that had the semblance and behavior of humanity but really wasn’t. It was not a clash of civilizations or of values or of cultures; it was a question of which organ, which chamber of the heart, which one of its dear five senses would humanity cut off to join modernity.
Which is why he said he hated nectarines. Brugnons , in French. People were being nectarized , sweet without kindness, all the right feelings but none of the heart, engineered, stitched, C-sectioned, but never once really born—the head part plum, the ass part peach, and balls the size of
I envied him. I wanted to learn from him. He was a man. I wasn’t sure what I was. He was the voice, the missing link to my past, the person I might have grown up to be had life taken a different turn. He was savage; I’d been tamed, curbed. But if you took me and dunked me in a powerful solvent so that every habit I’d acquired in school and every concession made to America were stripped off my skin, then you might have found him, not me, and the blue Mediterranean would have burst on your beach the way he burst on the scene each day at Café Algiers.
In another country, another town, other times, I would never have turned to him, or he given me the time of day. I was not in the habit of approaching a complete stranger, would never have done so had I not seen something of me in him, something muted and forgotten in me that I recognized right away when it flared in his speech. His rants, for all their distorted, senseless dyspepsia, spoke to me, took me back to my past, the way Café Algiers took me back to something distant, unnamed, and overlooked in myself.
He, I would soon find out, was the only other human being in Cambridge who not only had not seen Star Wars but who refused to, who deplored it, who scorned the cult that had suddenly sprouted around it that summer. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker were on everyone’s lips as though they were familiar characters in a Shakespeare play, with R2-D2 and C-3PO trailing like minor fools and obsequious courtiers. But for Kalaj, it stood for all that was jumbo-ersatz.
ONE OF THE things that drew me to Kalaj at first had nothing to do with his mischievous sixth sense, or his survivor’s instincts, or his cantankerous outbursts that had strange ways of wrapping their arms around you till they choked you before they turned into laughter. Nor was it the mock-abrasive intimacy which put so many off but was precisely what felt so familiar to me, because it brought to mind those instant friendships of my childhood, when one insult about your mother followed by another about mine could bind two ten-year-olds for a lifetime.
Perhaps he was a stand-in for who I was, a primitive version of the me I’d lost track of and sloughed off living in America. My shadow self, my picture of Dorian Gray, my mad brother in the attic, my Mr. Hyde, my very, very rough draft. Me unmasked, unchained, unleashed, unfinished: me untrammeled, me in rags, me enraged. Me without books, without finish, without a green card. Me with a Kalashnikov.
If I liked listening to him, it was not because I believed or even respected the stuff he mouthed off every day at Café Algiers, but because there was something in the timbre and inflection of his words that seemed to rummage through a clutter of ancestral fragments to remind me of the person I may have been born to be but had not become. If I didn’t take his daily rants against America seriously, it was because it was never really America he was inveighing against, nor was his the voice of a bewildered Middle East trying to fend off a decaying and implacable West. What I heard instead was the raspy, wheezing, threatened voice of an older order of mankind, older ways of being human, raging, raging against the tide of something new that had the semblance and behavior of humanity but really wasn’t. It was not a clash of civilizations or of values or of cultures; it was a question of which organ, which chamber of the heart, which one of its dear five senses would humanity cut off to join modernity.
Which is why he said he hated nectarines. Brugnons , in French. People were being nectarized , sweet without kindness, all the right feelings but none of the heart, engineered, stitched, C-sectioned, but never once really born—the head part plum, the ass part peach, and balls the size of
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