We meet again, old friend, ye cold,
bright, orange, and very early morning. A shame I only see you when I give up
the devil juice or go to Turkey.
It’s 5:32am and I’m lying on a small
mattress in the middle of a gigantic corner room on the top of a sixth-floor
walk-up. A typical, warn and beautiful old Beirut apartment building, each
floor’s got 15-foot ceilings. Ascend them all in one go and you're far too
winded to lay siege to the manor house atop the mountain, much less slay the
master. But the building could not be better situated. We're at the end of
Gemmayzeh (the West Village of the 1980s) and the beginning of Mar Mikhael (the
East Village of the late 1990s). Just down the hill from the adorably modernist
Saint Anthony Melkite Greek Catholic Church, our building's a half a block west
from San Antonio di Padova, my personal favorite.
We live directly above two delightful restaurants, neither of which I can
afford yet both of which are kind enough to lend us water and electricity. The
first is a charming little Italian bistro whose Lebano-African chefs chain-smoke
in my stairwell and greet you with a cordial bonsoir. The second is
an even swankier Armenian joint. Oh but to think of that sweet delicious
forever distant first paycheck...
Three weeks ago, I proudly moved into
apartment number three. Number one had to be abandoned when my Danish
benefactor departed and the apartment's sorceress-proprietor returned from
abducting thumbless orphans in Kerala under the guise of organizing theatre
workshops. Number two, the nicest I've known in 29 years, had only been
available for the month of February, so into the latest brokedown palace we
stumbled in early March. Empty and abandoned for the past five years, it was
well beyond uninhabitable as little as two months ago when my delightfully warm, cheerful, easy-going, bearded, ponytailed,
Lucky-smoking, whiskey-sipping, Jack-of-all-trade Lebanese roommates
copped a deal with the owner, gutted the place and slowly started chiseling it
into a livable little oasis in their spare time. Our apartment is like
Lebanon, and Lebanon like its most proliferate product: the battered old
broken-down Mercedes slouched halfway over the sidewalk on every backstreet in
Beirut - dirty, rusted, dented, paint-chipped and
poky; tucked away in some bullet-riddled alleyway and left to die. Beneath the
pockmarks, however, is something timeless, finely tuned and sublimely tasteful.
Oh Lebanon, you 72-year old war-donkey that refuses to croak, no matter the
number of slugs.
Up on the top floor, the mornings are
bright and cold. If you don’t go to bed with pants and at least a long-sleeve
button-down, you’ll be up with the first sliver of light on the horizon, as I
am now. This time of year, the sun comes and goes like a thief in the night.
Between 5:52pm and 5:58pm, the richest late afternoon Avalara orange plunges
without warning into an ominous ocean of purple. The mornings undergo a similar transmutation.
In the absence of blinds - and if you don't abuse your chemical privileges the
night before - you go from marauding the Donbass with Nestor Makhno one moment
to picking the lent from your bellybutton the next. Pleasant dreams or not,
there's no more glorious way to begin the day: a cold draft, a blinding sun
and the raucous chime of church bells.
Though Beirut usually has neither
street names nor addresses, we live on Rue Pasteur, a beautiful, old, warn-out
street that stretches from downtown to the edge of Mar Mikhael, once a working
class Armenian neighborhood that's been inundated with hyper-fly book, brunch
and booze establishments and the Perennially Well Dressed Drinking Class in the
past few years. Rue Pasteur, for its part, is home to the city's most popular
arabic-language institute, an enchanting, multi-layered concrete
jungle-cum-garden gym that also houses a trendy hotel, a delicious,
affordable joint serving Lebanese fare, a rooftop bar called Coop d'Etat and
the city's most popular Anglophone pub quiz. Each Wednesday, roughly 100
alcoholic nerds from 20 nationalities turn out to determine which planets turn
counterclockwise and whether glasnost or perestroika means
"restructuring". It's a glorious affair. The MC, a quixotic little
Lebanese man who tosses us the occasional hint, has a strong North American
accent. When the questions don't involve planetary formations or chemical
processes, they harken to world history and global (i.e. Western) pop culture.
That's to say, there is no difference in the cultural knowledge needed to win a
pub quiz in Beirut than there is in London, Berkeley or Cambridge. Hence this
wonderful little country's greatest oddity: racist, short-sided and fiendishly tribal
on the one hand, it's comically cultivated and cosmopolitan, on the other.
Further east is Dawawine, a movie
theatre-bookstore-library-café-rooftop-terrace-bar of truly thuggish
proportions. For men, only finely crafted beards and shawl collars can show their face.
For women, anything less fly than 8 is thrown into the streets, a dirty
castaway Kulak with no future outside Our Favorite Five Letter Word. Here my
buddy works the Friday night shift, selling craft beers and exchanging
cinematic knowledge with whoever swings by that evening. By day he's a ____, by
night a film director. "What kind of movies do you make?" I inquire
the first time we meet. "Fucking depressing ones," answers one
friend. "Films about the human condition," says another. Last week we
shot a commercial in which I feature as corporate American stiff trying out a
new financial app. This week he's off interviewing at one of Europe's premier
graduate film schools.
Just north of us is the sea, a sliver
of which can be glimpsed not only from the balcony, but more importantly, from the bathroom. No, there's nothing quite like standing under a stream of
cold air and hot water while you feast your eyes upon on that interminable
sliver of dodger blue. 60 years ago, my roommates tell me, our building was on
the sea. Now it's maybe 500 meters north of us, the result of decades of
reclaiming land over a series of landfills. Immediately blocking our view is a
high-rise whose windowless backend butts up against us. This needn't be a
problem, however, as certain members of the apartment's Central Committee are
fast at work attaching high-beam lights to its back wall in anticipation of
estival festivities; and once we figure out how to work the projector
against the concrete, there'll be no need for sea views apart from those accorded by the bathtub. Plus, this building blocks out much of the congested,
coastal highway running just a block north, the last thing separating East
Beirut from the industrial port that stretches up toward Karantina.
Localese for "Quarantine,"
Karantina was first set aside as an area by the Ottomans in 1831 to house leprous European
sailors as they entered Greater Syria. Later it became the sight of the
infamous Karantina Massacre, when Phalangists killed up to 1,500 mostly Palestinian working-class
Muslims in January of 1976 (I met one flamboyantly outspoken little man
whose uncle partook in said massacre. Once, when given trouble at the Beirut airport
for being brown and half-Colombian, he played the Fascist Uncle Card and was subsequently treated by security to a hero's toast). Today, Karantina is best known for the summertime
stench of its slaughterhouse, the biggest in Beirut, its up-and-coming art galleries, and its preponderance of Civil War-chic night-clubs.
Pesky and pedantic history lessons
aside, the morning's now fully upon us and it's time for me to stroll to work.
On sunny days, it's a magical walk - a veritable 16-minute tour of much of the
city's finest architectural heritage. Crumbling, abandoned, bullet-riddled and
covered in graffiti: no closer to my innermost dreams than a Haribo factory
minutes after the rapture. Of course, none of what I see along my walk will
still be here in 15 years' time. However, as Kirby once said in reference to global
warming, by then it will be our grandchildren's problem, and only if we bother to have any. And by the time that
generation has come into being, from Beijing to Burundi they'll be too busy tweeting and tindering
angry birds to worry about agricultural devastation or rising sea levels. Or
perhaps they'll simply adapt. As Mr Rogers taught us, if you drop a fish in
boiling water, he'll make like a Belgian jihadi and blow that pop-stand. But if you
heat the water gently, and add a little salt....
