Gemmayzeh

Our street Gemmayzeh begins at what was once the Green Line, the ground zero and dividing line of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) that more or less separated the Muslim West from the Christian East of the city. It was green because of the foliage that sprang from the streets in the absence of any human activity outside of indiscriminate shelling. Starting at the edge of downtown, Gemmayzeh snakes eastward toward the old Armenian quarter of Burj Hamoud, suitably renamed Rue d’Arménie somewhere along the way.

Many of the older buildings on our street are still pockmarked with shelling and bullet-holes. Our landlord, who grew up on the first floor of the building but now lives above us on the fourth, recalls hiding in the closet for 10 days during one particularly nasty stretch of the war. The reason? Snipers beyond the Green Line, some four blocks away, had been taking aim at anything that moved on her block, including people inside their apartments. Only under the cover of darkness, when things had calmed down, could she, her mother and siblings be spirited off to Athens to stay with the grandparents until the fighting subsided.[1] In the meantime, her father would stay behind to ensure that (Phalangist) militias didn’t take over the building. 

The closer the Green Line gets to the sea, the harder it is to spot the traces of the war – or the city that preceded it. Heavily though not irreparably damaged by fighting, most of downtown was razed to the ground in the 1990s and rebuilt to resemble the Orientalist Pavilion at the Epcot Center, should Orlando ever host the World’s Fair. Ever present in the minds of its inhabitants, the actual traces of the war – and any part of Beirut that predated it – are replaced by sparkling towers, glistening shops and undulating escalators scurrying shoppers from one sleek vulgarity to the next. Long on politico-confessional memory, it will be interesting to see whether today’s young Beirutis will as adults ever recall the pre-Dubai-ification of the heart of their city.

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In 1920, the French general Henri Gouraud crushed the incipient Syrian Revolution and marched into Damascus as the head of the French Mandate of Syria. Before lighting his first celebratory bogalitz, he is reputed to have walked straight to the Grand Mosque to visit the tomb of Saladin, the Kurdish warrior who liberated Jerusalem after nearly a century of Frankish tyranny. Whereupon at the tomb he proclaimed, “Saladin, we have returned. My presence here consecrates the Cross over the Crescent.”[2] Three months later, in August 1920, this would-be crusader, born and raised on the Left Bank’s Rue de Grenelle, declared the creation of the state of Greater Lebanon. The official name of our street, popularly known as Gemmayzeh, is actually Rue Gouraud.

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The intersection with Avenue George Haddad, where Gemmayzeh street begins, is typical of the new Beirut: rich, colorful, bombastic and bleeding with a confidence that verges on feeling forced. At the southwestern corner stands the beginning of Saifi Village, an orientalist Pleasant Ville of pastel apartment blocks and empty piazzas plopped on the ruins of what used to be an artisan working class neighborhood, all in the hopes that If You Build It, [People with Petrodollars] Will Come. The marketing schema for convincing the Gulf’s moneyed masses to move in? “Saifi Village: 240 steps to major banks. 350 steps to the highway. 20 minutes to the airport.” Like a Saudi honeymoon, in and out as quickly as possible. Like much of downtown Beirut, it is a gated community without the gates: the cameras, security guards and empty luxury-brand boutiques preclude the need for anyone with a semblance of ‘normality’ from strolling in. That said, Saifi still has a density, proximity to the heart of the city and aesthetic that, to [my] untrained eye, is hard to completely write off. Once these wedding cake communities are weathered by 20 years of rain and shine and social decline, there may yet be hope. What future urbanists shall deem the Preemptive Need to Break a Few Windows in order to make things relatively interesting.

The northwest corner of the intersection is an empty 100+ acre lot already slated for further (very) exclusive residential development. Coming to our side of Avenue George Haddad, Gemmayzeh gets more interesting – and, for better or worse, considerably more Franco-European. Both fitting and odd, given that by simply crossing the street, we are officially in (Christian) East Beirut and now surrounded by French bakeries and Franciscan churches. Odd, because rarely are social, cultural and economic identifiers so blatantly obvious: as if to enter a boogie American neighborhood one first had to pass through a checkpoint selling overpriced lattés, Lush soap and lentil smoothies. Fitting, however, because the northeast corner is home to one of the city’s seven locations of Paul, an upscale Parisian chain of bakeries that even New York has yet to acquire. Across the street they’re opening a Monoprix.  

Heading east, both sides of the first block of Gemmayzeh are home to stately 19^th century buildings, each abandoned, riddled with bullet holes and broken windows. As is the case with much of the city’s ‘heritage’ structures, they’re too costly to repair, and the only thing preventing developers from tearing them down tomorrow are the complicated inheritance procedures and intra-family feuds over which brother owns this closet and which cousin that kitchen sink. Like St Louis or Detroit, there are hundreds of beautiful, abandoned old mansions and multi-story turn-of-the-century apartment buildings hidden and scattered throughout the hills of Achrafieh, the ‘borough’ that is synonymous with East Beirut (though by no means are they restricted to this area alone).

With the glaring difference, of course, that a great many people want to live here and even more want to build. Given the choice between shelling out to restore a drafty old artifact or cashing in for life, most families do not hesitate to sell. People want clean, comfortable, new, efficient shit, a man told me; to hell with restoring the architectural ‘gems’ of an age that most would rather forget. Fair enough. Though there’s a sizable population of thoughtful preservationists who disagree, they don’t own the buildings and probably never will.

Continuing down the street, the pedestrian is hard-pressed at times to tell what year – or even decade – it is. A half-block after the upscale bakery is an abandoned car parts wholesaler somewhat bizarrely called FAG. Meanwhile, four empty storefronts bearing Armenian surnames (ex: Dagabian et fils) flank the Rural Delights Boutique, while the rusty old bodega selling homemade Lebanese pizzas (“Snack La Reine”) is next to a shop selling imported handbags. In Gemmayzeh, gentrification is a peculiar kind of scourge, one that comes in violent bursts before rapidly retreating once the neighborhood’s longtime residents take to the streets (diverse, desirable communities the world over could learn a thing or two). Though you’re safer scaling the Syrian border than peddling around Beirut, we even have a bike store. Across the street – and just down the hill from the neighborhood’s trendiest bar – is an old antiquarian who stays open well after midnight on the weekends.

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Not three blocks into the neighborhood and Gemmayzeh is already home to a flurry of European institutions. One block north of our street is the Lebanese Boy Scouts (whose insignia are written in French despite the Scouts’ English origins). A stone’s throw away, just after a charming little French bistro, Le Petit Gris, is the Goethe Institut. This faces the back of the Collège du Sacre Coeur (est. 1894) – itself across the street from Église Saint-Joseph, a beautiful, simple and cavernous little grotto that feels more like a whiskey distillery than a place of worship. It is a cliché of hated clichés to remark upon how “European”, “Westernized” or “Latin” some aspects of Lebanon are, but that does not make the phenomenon any less interesting – or perplexing. Just next to the Jesuit school is a sign for the German Sprachinstitut. If there’s one thing and one thing only that unites the Lebanese people, it’s their unabashed adoration of Germany. I’ve heard a great many theories for why this is – some intriguing, others disingenuous – but the answer to that question will be the subject of a much longer piece.

Getting closer to the apartment, the gentrification grows a little more schizophrenic. On the left, there’s the swanky Beiruti diner called Kahwet Leila, where ageing beauties spend their days in clouds of smoke and gossip. From the outside, you’d be forgiven for thinking it a battle-tested institution from the 1950s. Yet the pangs of nostalgia grip Lebanon as much as anywhere else – and Leila’s website puts any misgivings of origins quickly to rest: “Kahwet Leila is an authentic kitsch Lebanese lounge that serves food and mood to a wide range of clientele. The objective is to create a setting of an ‘eatertainment’ business which comprises a healthy, fresh and affordable meal while enjoying a warm kitsch setting Lebanese ambiance.” At the bottom of the page is a shout-out to the restaurant’s parent group, the Food Trends Corporation, which promises “A commitment that drains a tribute to our heritage.”

I always knew I’d chosen the wrong profession (if not having one counts for something). Outside kickboxing and hi-scale hookery, marketing is only career where man is truly free. Indeed, just around the corner is another establishment which desecrated the gauntlet and named itself Kitsch. Its description reads as follows: “Kitsch is a café, boutique & bakery shop and is one of kind place. Kitsch offer a 'home away from home' feel and encourage visitors to feel at ease and take their time browsing through the various rooms teaming with countless novelties ranging from everyday accessories to vintage rarities. When you have done with that Kitsch invites to lay back and refresh with their selection of food and beverages. Kitsch features a wide collection of clothes from the latest fashion in USA, Paris, London and all over the world including lots of swimwear, shoes, bags, gadgets sunglasses and cool stuff that you can’t find anywhere else.”

Now I love the entrepreneurial spirit that springs from the bowels of mankind as much as the next Menshevik – and I’m not one to dog non-native speakers – but sometimes people should consult a friend before pulling the trigger. Then again, you have to admire the nostalgia-mongers’ dogged transparence: it beats the ambiguity of the t-shirts being sold at the Sunday market whose chest read: “Yes? No? Maybe so!” and “An oily fashion tance.”

Yet I do not want people to get the wrong impression. Firmly within one of the most pleasant urban bubbles I’ve ever laid eyes on, Gemmayzeh is a beautiful, rustic and charming neighborhood. And since the only currency we deal in is clichés, stop there we shall not. From here all the way to the Armenian quarter, nearly every man is bearded à la Civil War chic; a third of women smoking outside the understated, dimly lit pop-up bars don patch-work tights, oversized cable-knit sweaters and crazy blonde curls; the beret-and-AK-toting cops in blue camo are either playing candy crush, chain-smoking or chatting with passersby; and each and every motorist screams past you in one of two vehicles: a black Range Rover or a blue one. Within the bubble, the only people driving anything worth less than $60,000 are children and the handicapped.

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These are the Laws of the Bubble – a pampered principality in which it is all too easy to lose oneself. As (privileged-country) foreigners on a very spurious “writing project,” we’ve been mysteriously welcomed in two weeks’ time into some of the country’s finest circles. How does the expression go? Fake it ‘til you’ve recourse to nothing but the shady Irish sneak-out? In the past week alone, one introduction has lead to two, and before you know it you’ve scaled the walls of class solidarity and waltzed into a dinner party in one of Lady ____’s 18^th century palaces, perched on the hill, hidden by the city’s last remaining foliage and only accessible through a series of meandering staircases, terraces and black iron doors. Grilled whilst trying to justify our presence at a private dinner party for the city’s ruling class, I impishly asked the 50-something matrician if she worked in the “arts.” She let her tallboy crash to the Persian rug: “I am President of the [country’s most important international arts] festival and am the managing director of [the most important French-language newspaper].” Ah yes, I see! I think I’ve heard of both. You know, this one time, my friend found a dead cat and a $100 dollar bill on the very same day. We bought some brandy and went down to the river…

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Yesterday afternoon we were lunching in the French Mandate villa of Sir ______, a Baronet and old Etonian of aristocratic Irish-Lebanese stock. We’d somehow made a favorable impression upon his stately, elegant wife several nights prior and been invited to make a Sunday afternoon house call. (Little do they know their guest can scarcely cross the Canadian border without being detained and interrogated for some youthful indiscretion that refuses to disappear from Ottawa’s records). Asked to explain our presence in his home, we mustered some miserable musing about curiosity and keeping an open-mind about things, a passion for life, love, laughter and lentil soup. Eat, pray, poop? Whatever it is the kids are doing these days. And my! is that lemon-tree in the courtyard pretty. “Do you really think so? I’ve been meaning to cut it down for ages.”

Slightly absurd social encounters aside, the point is that foreigners receive a special treatment that verges on the extreme in Lebanon. Whether or not it’s done in good faith is beside the point: upon hearing some doctored version of our raison d’y être, people have let us into their lives and homes with unprecedented hospitality. As if we’re one of them. It’s hilarious, if slightly unnerving at times. A Paris-based art-dealer one night; a famed Russian-Danish interior decorator the next. In a city of chronic traffic, poor urban planning and massive, sprawling, suburban slums, all of the old guard we’ve met lives within a 5-minute walk of one another, somewhere in the plush hills of Achrafieh perched above Gemmayzeh. It is the most wonderful bubble a bumpkin could find.

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The American University of Beirut (AUB) recently had a fully funded scholarship program for Palestinian refugee girls to become nurses. These are people born and raised in Lebanon, whose parents and quite often grandparents were also born here. Yet not only do they have no right to ever obtain Lebanese citizenship or receive any of the privileges that citizenship may bestow in a semi-failed state, they are also barred from holding the vast majority of jobs in Lebanon, especially anything that smacks of upward mobility. Despite the country’s chronic shortage of nurses, the Palestinian girls graduating with said nursing degrees from the country’s most prestigious university were prevented by law from actually working as nurses – a profession reserved for Lebanese citizens alone. I am told that many wound up becoming receptionists instead.

That is the most elementary power of the bubble: the ease with which it warmly welcomes the foreigner is greatly exceeded by its exclusion of those who spend their entire lives in its shadow. This, of course, is by no means unique to Lebanon: the US gets better by the day at marginalizing its poor and working classes. But here the contrast is far more extreme. Our first week in town we scarcely left the cool, leafy confines of the city’s fashionable, gentrified core; but the charm of its cosmopolitan inner ring all too easily distracts you from a much darker underside.

One small but glaring example was the garbled, toothless cabbie who picked us up outside of the horse races (another tale). A sweet if bumbling old sack of bones, he wanted to know if we were from Italy. Sorry – Denmark and USA. “Ahh, very good country.” What about yours? “Very bad country… at least for people like me.” The plunge: why so? At the next stoplight, he pulls over, turns around and lifts up his tattered shirt: his entire stomach is riddled with bullet holes. Shot 29 times by the Syrians in 1982. Entire family murdered in the war – siblings included. A Phalangist militia from the Mountain, his entire family was killed in the war, siblings included. Stricken, it was only later that we wondered how many lives he too must have taken. Several days afterward I asked an acquaintance how many of the men walking among us and now in their 50s and 60s had participated in the war. “All of them. Especially the cabbies.”

For anyone from a (post)-conflict society, these anecdotes are no more than amateur disaster-porn. But for someone spending their first week between bookstores and superfly cafés peopled exclusively by some of the world’s most bewitching beings, the creeping realization that something’s deeply amiss comes with a sting – and a warning. How much more weight can the bubble withstand? According to many, none: it’s an illusion, a placebo, a demented psychological condition. In a country always on the verge of implosion; in which everyone with means is desperate to leave; in which a divided elite, a chronically inactive state and a sadistic army barely can barely serve a “native” population of 3.8m, much less the 2m Syrian refugees, on top of 650,000 already permanently stateless Palestinians – it’s amazing the bubble exists at all.

Less than ten blocks from where Western-educated fashionistas sip $5 coffees is a seething slum of a Hezbollah stronghold. Along with giant, repetitive posters of bearded imams, fallen martyrs and Iranian flags, the party’s green, black and red insignia hangs from most porches and every streetlamp. Of course, apart from these ideological accoutrements – and the fact that you probably shouldn’t take pictures – it is no different from other working class Beiruti neighborhoods: it’s lively and pleasant, if poor and dense, but only a five minutes’ walk from Saifi Village and two minutes from Monot, a posh Christian neighborhood that’s literally across the freeway and home to a series of beautifully restored churches, English pubs, French bistros and the best Armenian café west of Yerevan. 

Several miles to the south, half the distance from Clayton to Ferguson, fester some of the biggest Palestinian refugee camps, where people have been rotting in legal limbo for more than 60 years. Born and raised on Lebanese soil, virtually none of them will obtain Lebanese citizenship. I was told that Palestinians who’ve spent their entire lives in the south of Beirut refer to everything outside the camps as “Lebanon.” Within it, of course, is Palestine. How the massive influx of both Syrian and even Syrian Palestinian refugees will alter the balance remains to be seen.  

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Back on Gemmayzeh we go for our first meal at _____, a cheap and thriving local joint serving traditional cuisine. From noon until nearly midnight, it is thronged with people of every background. Women in veils laughing and smoking shisha; silver foxes pounding jars of arak and mounds of mutton while their pencil thin wives take spurious stabs at barely visible cucumber salads; garrulous groups of early 20-somethings chain-smoking and sipping Almaza, the sweet delicious water that passes for the country’s only truly national beer. Just across the street from our apartment, not once in 16 days has a table been empty at this crowning establishment. It is cheap, delicious and utterly kitschless. For a moment, an hour, an evening – it really doesn’t matter what’s happening elsewhere.

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[1] Her mother was a Greek born in Alexandria who had fled to Lebanon in the mid-1950s after Nasser expelled most of Egypt’s Jews, Greeks, Italians, Syrians and Armenians, among others. Her mother left Lebanon during the Civil War to settle permanently in Athens.

[2] For more, see Tariq Ali’s The Clash of Civilizations, p.42-3

Innocents Abroad, or From Lebanon with Love

It’s 4:38am in Beirut and I cannot sleep. The three possible culprits are: one, the maté I sipped until somewhat late; two, the lack of devil juice; and three, the discombobulating dreams I was having just a moment ago. At the risk of recalling their finer points, I’ll spare the reader details. Also, this being the tail end of a rather decadent holiday season, the previous night had been my first one off the donkey-cart in well over two weeks. Some combination of the above has brought me to the breakfast room table at 4:38am with the hope of doing some small justice to this frenzied, fractious and utterly wonderful new fief we find ourselves in.

Though you wouldn’t know it by the barometer, it’s freezing inside the apartment. Not literally, since we’re thankfully no longer in a land where people speak literally, but damned cold all the same. Sunny and brisk by day, the city is chilly if not downright cold at night. True, there are small electric heaters on which to warm your hands, but they often drive the electrical system to a breaking point. Some delicate balance must always be struck between turning on more than several lights, heating the shower, charging an appliance, boiling water or running a load of laundry. Elite-sector second- or third-world problems, to use a dastardly turn of phrase, but a pain in the ass all the same.  

Even in our boogie, vibrant neighborhood only blocks from the sparkling new high-rises, mosques and designer souks downtown, the city’s power cuts are frequent and enduring. Whether an expensive hotel bar or an avant-garde theatre, a pulsating nightclub or a wealthy residential apartment building, the power is apt to go out at any moment. In one acquaintance’s rather sumptuous spot, the host had already lit a small fire and tastefully lit a plethora of candles around the room; when the power shut off in mid-conversation, he quietly slipped away to tinker with the generator while the rest of us continued as if nothing had happened.

Sipping our host’s wine in the candlelight, I mentioned that I found these momentary power cuts most charming and delightful!  You know, in the fun-loving we’re-all-in-the-same-boat kind of way: just as the lights cut out, the busboy spills his jug of water; the baron squirts mustard all over his pants; Madame Marie-Madeleine drives the spoon into her nose, spilling pea soup down the bosom of her garment. Who will trip? Who will go for the cheeky smooch? The pervy Transmilenio booty-grab? On some celestial stoop the unemployed gods are sitting around, sipping tallboys and placing bets on Beiruti power cuts and the social fallout they subsequently incur. My host suddenly pulled himself together: “Nonsense, you only like the power cuts because you’re a silly red-nosed tourist.”

Many of the early 20^th century apartments in the city are large and drafty, ours in particular. Here, on Rue Gouraud, or Gemmayzeh as its known locally and in Arabic, the ceilings are 15 feet high and the doors around 9. I could toss a grape or a peanut to the ceiling and catch it in my mouth on the way back down, but not much else. Not even with those high-school-basketball-calf-enhancers could you jump and hit the ceiling with the tip of a broom. Thanks to Jeppe, the Danish don of dons, ours is the largest apartment I’ve ever “lived” in and is the stuff of lurid dreams: of covetous balls and banquets; the plotting of coups; the hurling of champagne glasses against the wall in fits of passionate fury; the sipping of muddy Turkish coffee and sucking down Camels with the gusto of a Gambian civil servant. Mind you, I do not associate any of this behavior with the Lebanese people or the inhabitants of Beirut: I merely associate it with very large apartments that line crumbling, old, narrow, prosperous city streets. When I make my fortune selling bananas, I shall build an entire city of replicas of this place.

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From Istanbul I arrived in Beirut around four in the morning, somewhat in a daze. We’d put back many a tinto after crashing a party at the Istanbul Modern earlier that night, and hadn’t time to pick up anything more substantial than a bean-paste Turkish taco for dinner. I fell asleep on the bus to the airport, but luckily made a maté once I got through security. Those rapacious dogs at the airport were charging $15 to get online, but Pepe, an Italian aide worker whom we’d bump into on the sidewalk bars the following night, lent me his computer to look up the address of the apartment we were subletting for the month.

For whatever reason, Beirut addresses do not have numbers, though I’ve been told that at some point in time they did. I wonder if it’s a remnant of the civil war, the national equivalent of the ‘streets having no name’. Instead, a Beiruti address is simply the name of a street, followed by the city (Peggy Sue’s Diner, 21^st Street, Duluth, MN). Occasionally someone will specify the name of the building and the floor, but I’m told that most people have a PO box at the post office where they receive their mail. Otherwise, you get by on landmarks. “I live on the fourth floor of the building above the bodega with the poster of an Alpine donkey, just next to _____ Armenian restaurant.” That’s fine, I tell my interlocutor, but how does _____ Armenian restaurant divulge its address? In relation to the Alpine donkey? 

In our case, the address was: “Rue ______, 100m after police station, across from _______ restaurant, light green building with the black iron door.” I’d scribbled it on the first old skittle-stained crumpled library receipt I could find at the bottom of my bag. (A side not: my traveling companion and I are pretending to be aspiring journalists, and yet neither of us ever has a pen or even a piece of paper. Instead, we are reduced to borrowing pens from our interlocutors and scribbling names, quotations, phone numbers, recipes, bank codes, and locations of hidden treasure onto our hands. We have a long ways to go before we do anything to remedy this situation).

At the bottom of the escalator, 100 meters before the passport control, a police or army-man rightly dubious of my credentials momentarily detains me (for all you fellow pompous, aspiring scribblers: never put “writer” as your profession when entering any country within 1000 miles of a war). For Syrians and Iraqis refugees fleeing vicious civil wars, they need papers, cash and credentials to legally enter Lebanon, but North Americans, Europeans and Australians can usually stroll through its cedar gates free of visa with a one-way plane ticket and an illegible address scribbled onto an old receipt: a glaring privilege we no doubt fail to appreciate.

Along with a group of dirty Scandinavian backpackers, I am taken aside. “Where are you staying, silly little man?” In the light-green building with the black iron door. “With whom?” A lady called _______. “What’s her phone number?” I forgot to write it down when I borrowed Pepe’s computer. “Well then find it.” After much struggle, I locate the number and hand it over. The senior bespectacled officer disappears around a corner, only to return 20 minutes later. She must have answered to their liking. “Her name is _______?’ Yes, her name is _______. “Ok, you are free to go.”

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I split a cab with two French girls and a Franco-Lebanese guy who, while charming, has command of neither French nor Arabic nor English. This makes for a poor chief cab-fare-negotiator in a city in which all three seem nearly universally and, at times, interchangeably spoken. All three of them were returning from Frogdom to resume their studies at the American University of Beirut (AUB), a most fascinating place and about which I should like to write a fair deal in future posts.

Now, there are many extremely gratifying aspects of traveling to new countries, but the most important by far is the initial 7-8 minutes after leaving the airport. These precious few minutes are like a first kiss with a girl you truly admire; your first time biting into a watermelon jelly-belly; the light and fiendishly pleasant fuzziness of your first encounter with alcohol. Whether it’s the new billboards; the mysterious hue of a new and unknown urban haze; an endless expanse of magically horrendous towers whose millions of inhabitants one dreams of drinking with some day but never will.

Only in these first few minutes do you know you’ve truly landed. After all, the airport security and passport check might all have been a hoax, a wildly elaborate Potemkin village. The pilot could have just as easily flown us to Arkansas or Azerbaijan and hired a hundred mustachioed ex-cons from gas stations on the Jersey turnpike to dress up as Lebanese border patrolmen. Is that really Arabic they’re speaking? Nay, only when you’ve left the airport and can see the buildings, see the flags, see the military checkpoints, see the ridiculous proportion of motorists that are heavily made-up, fantastically boogie, sunglass-donning, comically attractive Cayenne-and-Rover-pushing 34-year old mommies do you truly know you’ve actually arrived in Beirut.

The driver drops each of the three students off first. With flawless English and, somewhat surprisingly, very decent Spanish, he pontificates, feeding me cigarettes all the way. I’m weary of asking a sensitive question, so I smoke mostly in silence as he drives in circles pointing out local landmarks. We’re “looking for the right exit” but also investing more time in a collective shared experience that will no doubt lead to a magical doubling of the price. Yet since we’d already agreed upon the fare, I was happy to get a free tour and smoke his Marlboro lights.

Alas, in the road of life, all companions must eventually part – and my very first Lebanese companion insists on doubling the price the moment we arrive at said address. Such is the human condition! In the space of less than a minute, we go from the closest of compadres to the bitterest of foes. But, God willing, it’s 5:15 in the morning and I have finally arrived. I ring the buzzer of the light-green building with the black iron door.