Who else is going to love someone like you that’s marked for death
I. Anti-Semitism (The Return of the Repressed)
When K moved back to Oakland, we got in the habit of going to Eli’s once a week, early, so we could soak up the sun I guess and the emptiness of the patio at that time of day: and where I could (re)introduce him to the queer trashy Oakland he’d left behind when he’d had to go to LA for a few years. At Eli’s he would smoke cigarillos and his pipe and the other dark tobacco his lungs had gotten accustomed to hereditarily, epigenetically, from his dad, whose tastes in tobacco and mild hallucinogens/stimulants had been influenced equally by the 1970s shop floor, by the Sandinistas, and by an informal Hezbollah retirement community for disaffected Jewish leftists in the Beqaa Valley. He’d started to go to bed earlier, I guess, he was a scholar with insomnia and he didn’t envy the night, or thrive in the night, like I did, pathologically, so the Eli’s of coke and sex in the bathroom was foreign to him, at least for awhile. I chainsmoked Newports there, of course, and read when I was on my own, which I usually was, and looked for an endless succession of queer melancholic women with tattoos and a seductive schizoid rage towards the word to meet some shitty archetypal Jungian need, something that had to do with gender and longing and self-hatred.
One night though we went to Missouri Lounge in west Berkeley. This was right before everything shut down for Corona. K of course went into isolation a little earlier than everyone else. He was a hypochondriac, like I was, but in a different way. I feared socio-erotic ego annihilation and he feared the persecution side of illness, the fascist side of illness. Neither of us was overly concerned for our personal survival, but he was the kind of guy to go underground for months, maybe for years, and read everything and emerge with an almost obscene intelligence (and of course he had his partner, his own anima, or whatever, and they had weed and sex and their own decade of prefigurative praxis behind them: they had essentially seen this coming, and they had done everything but prepare with firearms, they were like Roque Daltons and Valerie Solanases just ready to be handed a gun, or a knife if need be, which they could turn on themselves or the National Guard, depending on how things played out). I was the kind of guy to go into isolation and start drinking, and maybe writing a little, and then start a new contraband relationship with a girl from FetLife, the communist daughter of Central Valley Michoacán field workers, against Gavin Newsom’s injunction against fucking. There are certain friendships that proceed entirely astrologically along these lines. As if friendship, at least the kind of friendship that had mattered to me in the long dawn of fascism, had been a kind of unconscious preparation for guerilla holy war. As if the implicit promise of death was contained in every possibility of friendship. As if when we’d been tripping on various drugs, or just getting fucked up, we were like those Argentine guerillas in clandestinity undergoing mass entheogenic therapy, fucking, in tears and hysterics, reading Marx and Mariátegui, and even Lacan, for some reason, a day or two before we were rounded up. A decade of that, and now it all makes sense. We went to the Missouri Lounge because K was coming back from the COLA protests in Berkeley, and we spent all told eight or nine hours drinking and talking that night, we touched on everything. K, as always, was trying to build a dialectical bridge: in this case between the ultras and the union, or between the messianic comp lit grad students and those who took a more sober view of reality, though of course the question of utopia versus reality was a complicated one, more complicated now than ever, and as he would say, exhaling a cloud of smoke, there are bad people on both sides (I don’t think I ever knew someone who took a more dialectical view of human beings, also a more cynical and more generous view, who sensed viscerally that life precedes judgment, that judging in its own right is only another activity, like bile were an essential part of the human organism, or like having Marx’s fantasy about hunting in the morning and fucking/napping in the afternoon, and actually I had been to protests with him on four different continents, I’d been arrested with him in Oakland and in Cairo, and I can’t imagine a better person to go to a protest with, because he never divorced hedonism from commitment or danger from self-preservation (the absolute willingness to risk one’s life but never to risk one’s pleasure or autonomous criticism), sometimes we’d just show up at an anti-war protest and he’d take the lay of the land, survey the crowd and make a few jokes, talk to a few people, and say let’s go to this Szechuan Restaurant in Chinatown for Chinese New Year where the chef used to be the person chef for Hu Jintao, or maybe for Deng himself, and there’d be a picture of Obama on the wall, who had supposedly eaten there, and we’d eat the chicken with Sichuan peppercorns until tears were streaming out of our eyes, I never enjoyed it honestly, I haven’t enjoyed food in at least ten years, or probably never, but with K I did, I liked his gastronomic philosophy, because eating would always unleash conversations, e.g. on the connection between spicy food and colonialism and revolution, just as we ate huge plates of spicy koshari right after Sisi’s coup in Cairo, in between protests, I don’t remember what we ate in Argentina when he interviewed the almost completely moribund and sacredly old madres in the Plaza de Mayo during a protest against the 2014 bombing of Gaza about the connection between the anti-Operation Condor struggle in Latin America and the struggle against Zionism, and what was amazing about that is that he had basically taught himself Spanish overnight to do the interview, more or less, in the same way he taught himself Arabic a few years before in a summer of tremendous asceticism in Cambridge, starting with classical Arabic, only to land in Beirut on his way to working in Shatila at a hostel where everyone was learning bullshit conversational Arabic in order to party and hunt for a job at Vice during the early years of the Syrian Civil War when it was still fashionable to take the side of al Qaeda, but the funny thing about that hostel is that it contained all types of degenerates and spooks (and people who were unconsciously one or the other or both), it was like Rick’s Cafe for the the war in Syria, and I remember on my first night there, when I’m flown from Santiago to see K, I drank beers with an Irishman who was pretty far gone. K later told me that he was a late-stage alcoholic who wouldn’t stop bothering him when he first got to Beirut. He was staying in the same room as K. He claimed to be a documentary filmmaker and he drank himself into a stupor by four o’clock in the afternoon, at the latest, pissing and vomiting. K asked him what he planned to do in Syria. The Irishman, whose every third word was “man,” or “mahn,” said something along the lines of, Mahn, I don’t know, mahn, I just think, mahn it would be cool to go to Syria, mahn, and report, mahn from the perspective of the Assad government, mahn, because I just think, mahn, the western media, mahn, has given the guy a bad rap, mahn, I just think he’s a decent guy, mahn, etc. When he was finally able to present his plan to the Syrian embassy, he was turned down, which caused his spirits to sink for about a day before he decided he’d like to make a documentary about the Palestinians instead. So K spent an evening drinking with him and giving a primer on the conditions of Palestinians in Lebanon, a primer he would have refused to give to any journalist he thought would make use of, or even remember, anything he said. One eventhing, the Irishman came up to him with an idea for his documentary. It’ll be about you, mahn, he said. Just you, mahn, talking to the camera, mahn, just like you always, do. Later, K heard that he’d changed sides and was trying to join up with Al-Nusra. He was the first Assadist and the first renegade. At some point K gets up to go to the bathroom. Right away a girl sits down and takes his place. She’s drunk in a way that puts me on my guard, with that outward gaze of homicidal solipsism that some alcoholics get at a certain point in the night, without fail. She looks like she’s come from hell, I think to myself. Like a famished demon from the lowest realm of the bardo, or like sex distilled to its nightmarish, terrified and sadistic essence (Céline would want to fuck her, I think, only a half-schizophrenic Nazi writer-doctor would want to fuck her, but she is a type). I keep smoking my cigarette and look at her. I’m incapable of not provoking the violent and traumatized, I see something of myself in them that I want to see staged (I’m attracted to it and I viscerally need to see that it’s real, that the outside and the inside are of the same, asphyxiating nature). Is your friend Jewish?, she slurs. Her vocal fry is torture. Is your friend Jeeeeeew-eeeessssssshhhhh? I give her that look again, but this time it’s a different look, it’s a look that tries to annihilate the other person, that succeeds in doing so, it only works with fascists, with people whose psyches have been corroded by fascism. It has nothing to do with hatred, I don’t know how to describe it. It’s the gaze I imagine Fassbinder had at all times, a kind of degenerate smirk, the mirror that someone who has nothing left to lose holds up to fetishists who can only kill in fantasy. Do you think I’m Jewish?, I ask her. She blinks, as if she didn’t hear me. But is your friend Jewish?, she asks again. Why the fuck do you want to know if he’s Jewish?, I say, finally. It’s just that his profile looks Jewish, she says. I saw him from all the way over there and I said to myself, that guy’s Jewish….Don’t look at me like that…You know I’m Jewish, too. Then she starts to tell a story without a beginning or a point, a traumatic story about a man who came into her house, who was in her house, her basement. At certain times it seemed that he was her boyfriend, at other times a one-night stand, at other times her brother, or a complete stranger, a psychopath. At certain times in the story he locked her in her basement, she seemed to be on the verge of saying he’d abducted and raped her, but then he was a friend again, an inquisitor, maybe a cop. He’d wanted to know if she was Jewish, she said. That’s why she was asking about my friend. K started to walk back to the table and when she saw him she got up in a fright, as if he was a bearer of plague or of a secret, malignant knowledge. I told K about the encounter, which for both of us was shocking in its atavism and absurdity. We never took our Jewish identities personally: it was only much later in life that we discovered ourselves as contingent wounded beings, long after we’d left behind any tenuous connection to the longue duree of our Jewish pasts (we shared a knowing snarky suspicion of groups like Jewish Voices for Peace). When I first met him K was into weight-lifting and Spinozoist communism (I harbored delusions of being a Jewish Che Guevara, a kind of sensitive lumpen thug, queer and murderous). For some reason I always remember his theory about Proust and Spinoza (at one point we were “phallic intellectuals”), which was a theory about hypochondria and divinity, or about time and the body, about death and the impossibility of death, about bodies that reveal themselves through time, or rather never get to reveal themselves because they’re cut short, castrated, and bodies that are the leftwing mirror image of fascism, pagan bodies of pure gnosis, or about his own personal suffering and the way he could transcend it at certain moments, on the back porch we shared in Somerville, a back porch that was always on the verge of collapse due to neglect from our Portuguese landlords, who were waiting for the inevitable spike in rents, where we always knew the hour to transition from cigarettes and coffee to stronger tobacco and whiskey. There are certain friendships that are carcinogenic in the best sense. What other non-Jewish Jews did we idealize back then? Marx, of course, but not Engels, Lenin at his most syphilitic, Walter Benjamin when he was tripping, Andreas Baader, Carlos the Jackal… At some point the girl, who’d been looking at us all night, stumbled back to our table. She sat down and smiled, looking almost serene, flirty. I’m so sorry about before, she said. I just wanted to know if your friend was Jewish. She looked at K, imploringly. K looked back at her with his look of infinite patience, infinite understanding, the opposite of my practiced anti-fascist gaze, but equally impenetrable. He treated her like a hurt child, but on his level, as if we were all on the same level, at the end of the day. I remember when he first started teaching R and I visited him in L.A. and R asked him how he dealt with the incorrigibly stupid students, and K said very sincerely that every one of his students was brilliant, that everyone is brilliant. R cackled (R from the first day I met her was a sincere Stalinist and at times a eugenicist, who believed in the gulag, not out of aesthetic vindictiveness, but out of a kind of reality principle she’d inherited from her mother). No one is disposable, he started to say sometimes, before I understood what that meant: after a friendship steeped in narcissistic anathemas, in manic omniscience, it was hard for me to adjust. He tried to talk her through the thought process that leads someone to make physiognomic judgments about another person, about how we sort populations in different ways at different points in time and geography, about the inherent hurt that’s activated when someone perceives someone else without encountering their history, their origin, their self-understanding. He was giving a seminar on the origin of race and capitalism in terms that would have been lucid to a child, or to a traumatized alcoholic. When K was done the girl looked at him with a deep calm, as if he had healed something in her. Then she said, you don’t understand, you just look like a Jew. She started to talk about mitochondrial DNA and the twelve Jewish matriarchs. She started to tell the story of the man in her house again. K kept going with his pedagogical patience, and finally she looked like she was about to cry. Then she made a jerk-off motion and a farting noise. K laughed and told her to go fuck herself. Fear and patience…whereas with me it was always fear and lashing out, a theatrical machismo…I was always afraid that I would disappear, that I didn’t exist…whereas K feared that he was condemned to be alone by the arbitrary imposition of the membrane of his body, his self…I twisted myself into every imaginable form and K thought he was overly-formed, performative. He never wanted to act and I thought I acted too much. The question of action dissolved later in his acid compassion, his absolute rejection of vanguardism. Though he was younger I mistook him for a superego, probably because he knew how to be alone.
I think K saved my life twice, though after awhile in our demented proletarian journey through this world we realize that our lives are nothing and are constantly being saved, upheld by something like a joke that arrives just in time. The first was when he got us from the suburbs of Shatila to the Beqaa Valley in a van that was operated by a prominent narco-Hezbollah clan, taking migrant workers back to their villages and young grizzled soldiers to the Syrian border. We had arranged to be there, but it was a vague arrangement, a promise made by an irresponsible and loquacious patron. His underlings had no idea to expect us and when he saw two Americans showing up one of them was suspicious, of course. Who are you motherfuckers?, he said in English. CIA? MI6? Mossad? K said something in Arabic, I don’t know what, but he made the guy laugh, and we were on our way. The rest of the trip I’ll pass over in silence, though it ended with us in the ruins of Baalbek, which were completely deserted, besides us and a lone vendor selling Hezbollah t-shirts, which had fallen out of popularity. On a cliff above the ruins K smoked his pipe and passed it to me once in awhile, while we listened to mortar explosions from the war going on over the mountains. The second time we were in Cairo, a week or so later, towards the end of 2013. K wanted to go to the campus of Al Azhar University, whose students made up the militant backbone of the banned Ikwhan. A lot of them had been gunned down at the nearby Rabaa mosque a few months before. K was taking photos of anti-regime graffiti when two security guards in suits came up to us and asked us what we were doing. One of them was wiry and nervous and the other fat, stolid, bored-looking. The wiry one did all the talking. We’re just visiting the campus, K said. Visiting?, the guard said. Don’t you know this is not a place to visit, right now. K tried to say something in Arabic and the guard interrupted him. Speak English, he said. Why are you here? K played dumb. It’s a very famous, very ancient university, he said. Maybe the oldest university in the world. I don’t need you to tell me about the university, the guard said. Let me see your phone, he said, and grabbed it from K’s hands. Yours too, turning to me. We handed them over. The wiry guard talked to the fat guard for awhile. This was the pattern. A few cryptic and banal questions and a lot of consulting. They called into some superior on their walkie-talkie. For some reason I wasn’t afraid, I think I disassociated the entire time, even though I knew they were killing leftists left and right, for no good reason, including foreigners, and a few years later an Italian grad student was murdered and disappeared for his doctoral research on the Egyptian left and the labor movement. Come with us, the guard said. They took us into an office and confiscated our wallets. We were alone for awhile. I don’t know how long. It could have been hours but it probably wasn’t. In my memory we were smoking, probably because we that’s how these things play out cinematically and because we were constantly smoking in the so-called Arab world, shisha and some hash and there were those cheap Lebanese cigarettes that we inhaled like fiends, I think they were called Cedars. K was in good spirits. He was the opposite of me in the sense that he was always calculating the danger of any given situation, but seemed to be incapable of fear once he had made his choice. He was afraid of being robbed of his agency, not his life, whereas I never really approached life with any strategy, but I was desperately afraid of death. I remember at some point the guard came back in and asked K why he spoke Arabic. I just love the language, he said. It’s a beautiful language. I think he named some poets, I don’t remember. You know, the guard said, you are fucking idiots for being here. You shouldn’t be here. This is not the place for any normal person to be right now. Why the fuck are you here? And K said, we are interested in history, there is so much history here. Why don’t you study your own fucking history?, the guard said, laughing. Don’t you have history in your own country? He left again. When he came back he came back with the other guard, the fat one, and handed us our wallets and told us we could go. Don’t you think my colleague is a big fatass, he asked, and started to pat the fat guard’s stomach. Do you want to touch his big fat fucking stomach? The fat guard giggled. K laughed and said no, we’ll be on our way.
When we left K still wanted to go see the mosque. We started to walk down a vast, empty boulevard. I remember there was a very old, emaciated donkey-cart driver who seemed to have been hit by a car lying on the road with all his vegetables spilled out alongside him. He was grasping his head, which was bleeding, and a few cops were surrounding him. After I noticed him I looked up and saw that though the boulevard was empty, the buildings surrounding it were lined with military snipers. We kept walking towards the mosque. A few hundred yards away we saw a cordon of soldiers and a cavernous armored vehicle that looked like it could house hundreds of torture victims (as many torture victims as the National Museum, with the entire occult wealth of the country, itself had held). K looked at me and said maybe we should go back to the hostel. I agreed and we hailed a taxi.