Tag: fiction

Yalpoudougou Jules or The Easy Way

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In the lower belt of the Sahel, in the middle of West Africa, on a blazing hot day, about three miles outside of Ouahigouya in 1984 I am standing in a line sweating with all the other bus passengers breathing in the hot dusty air wafting up from the rusty sun-baked land. We have been ordered out of the bus by a squad of commandos who are going through every bag one by one. 

It was maybe a year after the Sankara coup and there was a lot of apprehension on the part of the new government, a lot of good ‘ole revolutionary rabble rousing with pick up trucks blasting revolutionary slogans, “L’imperialisme! A bas! Le Neocolonialisms! A bas! La Patri ou la mort! Nous vaincrons! La patrie ou la Morte! Nous vaincrons! Merci Camarades!” As a part of the new revolutionary agenda, it was concluded that more teachers were needed and thus batches of revolutionary “teachers” with minimal qualifications were given a cursory indoctrination and, with opaque objectives, sent off to schools to assist in the new revolutionary anti-neocolonial, anti-imperialistic educational intervention. That’s where Yalpoudougou Jules comes in. He had a shaved head and always wore green army fatigues. He was skinny, maybe in the mid five-foot range and was a hard headed type, self-righteous and easily triggered. A number of meetings and social gatherings among faculty had, at his instigation, degenerated into polemical exchanges. A more adamantly contentious individual would be hard to find. He was one of these revolutionary teachers thrown into the breach, and he miraculously happened to be on that bus with me.  Also on that bus was a nice package of shinkafa (that was rice in Hausa, our code word for weed) and it was in my bag on the roof of that bus and a commando who had tossed down all bags forward of it had his hand right on it. That was when Yalpoudougou Jules saved my ass. He was already into the thick of a diatribe of increasing intensity that began when we were stopped at the anti-imperialism road block. He had a high voice and the words came quick. “Je connais mes droites! Je connais mes droites! Vous ne pouvez pas faire comme ca camarades! Vous ne pouvez pas faire comme ca!” Everyone was mum baking under the sun and those commandos were sweating right through their uniforms. And the sun was baking and baking and Yalpoudougou Jules was getting louder and louder. The officer was arguing with him back and forth and Jules would not back down. It was the sun and Jules and Jules and the sun and louder and hotter and hotter and louder and flop—my bag dropped down, sending up a cloud of red dust when it landed on the parched laterite. And when a soldier was just crouching down beside my bag, to open and search it, the officer reached his limit. “OK  tout le monde monte! Sauf toi!” (Everyone back on except for you!) He said to Yalpoudougou Jules. “Tu prends tes baggages et tu vas a pied!” (You take your bags and walk!) I didn’t get busted and Yalpoudougou Jules had to walk into town.

Back to the present … It had been a long day skinning knuckles, squirming beneath the cabin sole running wire and squeezing my eyes closed to try to see with my fingers the head of a bolt I had to access on the blind side of a joist. You know when a prodigal returns and the blind sage is called to lay her wizened palms upon his face to verify his identity by touch? She gets a sketch more detailed than that of a police artist only with feeling, texture—it’s rhythmic and projects images of decades past of a joyful youth full of life who once skipped joyfully down the village lane. Believe in the concept. With a pinch in the dark, and a bit of practice, one can access angles and bolt size, even metric or SAE, or one can utterly fail, retreat like a sprained pretzel, resort to religion, the chisel and hammer or the sawsall. The results were miraculously positive for me that day. I had completed my list of tasks and there I sat reclined in the cockpit, sipping on a cold IPA when in the gathering dusk I did hear the familiar notes of the warbler. 

As we were hundreds of miles from our port of departure where I last saw him, I was a bit surprised as to how he had found us or how he had escaped the sanitarium, but there was little time to come to any resolution there uponst as with a pock and a stomp, and the pronouncement, “Bit of sun today and could be usin’ a nip of brew if it please yee,” he plopped down onto my cockpit grate. I produced the requested beverage and he ensconced himself along the port settee, myself on the starboard and we sat there staring out over the stern at the passing seabirds, the forest of masts set against the fading orange glow of the sunset.

And so, as he was there and knowing the old salt had visited countless countries and conducted boat repair around the world, I decided to share with him my dilemma of how to get boat parts I would be needing in several months in the next country of destination.

He let out a long sigh, gulped down the last of his beer, let out an air horn of an ancient belch and signaled by the raising of one bushy gray brow that he would like another. Once restocked he leaned back and let into a diatribe, both reflective and admonitory, the theme he called “the easy way.” 

“Now decades ago on an August day on a weekend I was pulling into Bonga Bonga. Now mind yee it was one of the smaller islands, not the main one, but I intended there to check in. I get to the police station and immediately the “official” there starts a homily of lamentations, oh that this is not the proper port of entry and oh the customs officer comes but once a month and oh we were hard upon the lee of a national holiday, of such a holiday I had never heard a peep, but I could sense a crescendo, a pat judicial tactic, and so I let him lead on to his intended theme. Well we could radio the capital and request that an agent be dispatched, or we could fill out an apppeal for an exemption, or we could file for a re-registration of your vessel as temporarily domestic. How long might that take? Nine months. My face was a mask of stoicism. Or we could just handle all this the easy way. Easy way, I responded with alacrity. Easy way! Of course the easy way was two thousand cowries and then the stamps, signatures and flashing photocopy lights were triggered. Easy way, he told me. Easy way. Get an engine into a remote harbor in East Asia at night? Easy way. Account for a passenger not on the original list? Easy way. Deliver a large bail of merchandise to a remote river town in the Northern Territory at zero dark-thirty and be gone? Easy way! I waded ashore, he said knocking on his wooden leg with a winch handle at his side. Easy way! Had no idea there might be a crocodile in that river. That was a tussle but did get some steaks out of him and sold his hide to a bag maker in New Guinea. Easy way! You get to customs, just hit that green button … nothing to declare and walk on through. Easy way! Easy way! And the bottom of another bottle swung up to the sky, the air horn blasted and the brow went up.

In theory, I like the easy way. Who could not ascribe to something called the easy way? What would be the alternative? However, I was arriving at the airport with a poop tank, a water heater and a roller duffle full of new tools. There was no concealing the obvious. I therefore took an alternative approach. I asked myself if I needed this kit and was willing to jeopardize all I went through to get it and possibly get the whole lot tied up in customs. Yes and No were the answers, so I went for an alternative to “the easy way “ called “shut up and pay up.” It’s usually what I end up resorting to unless, on the outside chance, there happens along some divine intervention in the form of Yalpoudougou Jules.

The Mighty Tercel, The Buddhist B*tch, and The Best Years of Your Life

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At that time, on every weekend morning, on the morning of every day I managed to have off, I would be walking in the cold lonely dark to the mighty Tercel, that crazy blessed contraption of a vehicle.

It was funny because we were leasing an apartment in this complex where all the streets and buildings looked the same and parking was scarce and I often had to park a ways away from our place and sometimes it took me a while to find the bloody hell car. In some sense it felt like being in an episode of The Twilight Zone. Wait. I know I have a car, but do I actually have a car? And all this landscaped area looks like it’s from the 1950s and it’s never used. Seems like a staged set. People don’t walk on the grass. The trees are trimmed to have abnormal circular foliage. The buildings have no graffiti and are all the same maddening cream color. Do all of us who live here have the same name and wear the same clothes? And where is my bloody hell car? And did I park it, or did my other park it? Some alien entity who calls himself me …

We sublet a place from a woman we called the Buddhist B*tch. She, she declared, was an artist. She had a bunch of canvasses slathered with paint to prove it. Ok, maybe I should provide more detail. Let’s go for the DIY approach. Go to the hardware store and get some cans of paint, like white, red, brown, blue, yellow, green, purple, and get big brushes like the ones you use to paint a house. Now, take a canvas about four feet square. That’s it. Now mix up some red with the brown and purple and slather a big heart on the canvas. That’s right, a big heart. Cover nearly all the space and just leave a little space on the borders. Now dip brush in yellow and green and splatter it on top. Done. Occupation—check. Now get a bunch of pictures of you standing with monks in robes and press your palms together with elbows out parallel and fingers towards the firmament and put a sublime smile of smug enlightenment on your face. Transcendent piety—check. Voila! Buddhist! Artist! B*tch!

She had a rent controlled unit intended to limit financial pressure on those in need. She turned this bit of charitable policy into a tidy profit making enterprise. Her gig was subletting her rented rent-controlled unit for months on end while living rent free with a family member and stocking away thousands in cash. A clever hedge with strong margins. The problem was the place was full of mold of which she performed a cursory cleaning right before a new two-legged ATM sublet her digs. Another part of the problem, the most inexcusable, was that the pious saintly selfless soul played dumb and denied it. Press those palms together now! Mold? What’s that? What have you done? Never saw mold before. I think you guys brought that mold with you. 

In any case, our little peanut was coughing and coughing and coughing. She would stand there in her crib, hands on the rail, looking up at me, tears running down her little cheeks, crying and crying and coughing and coughing saying, “No thank you! No thank you!” She didn’t quite know what it meant but it was one of the few things she knew how to say at that time. We thought she had pneumonia and took her to the doctor who prescribed amoxicillin. Well BB had some kind of conflict with family (probably tired of her mooching Buddhist ass) and was giving us the boot, months before the agreed upon departure date. We had to scramble. We were both working. What were we to do? Well, of course that was not BB’s problem. Funny coincidence though, one of those ugly “paintings” was worth, with a substantial discount extended, she affirmed,  $2000, exactly the amount of our security deposit. We, she suggested, could just walk off with that sublime iteration of creativity nirvana and leave her with our cash. No. We did not think so, but thank you for that generous offer oh Saintly Selfless Nonmaterialistic One.

We managed to legitimately rent another unit (for less than the amount charged by BB) and immediately, when we moved in to the new spot, brighter, no mold or bad karma, the peanut was all smiles and prancing about in her blue onesie with the zip up and the little snap under the chin happy as pie. No coughing. Teletubbies were big then. She loved that damned show. We had no furniture but had a little TV and a beanbag chair on the floor in a corner with her books and stuffies. She used to march around shuttling her forearms doing the Teletubby walk. Loved that. 

So, I would get in that car. Ok. I can’t say it. All right. Here goes. It was always loaded with wood, building materials, wire, tar paper, bags of concrete, all that was necessary for whatever was the projet du jour. Ok, let’s just get it out there. The car only had one seat, the driver’s seat, because someone (won’t mention who) had removed all the other seats so he could fit in all the building materials. Oh praise be to you wherever you mightst now be oh Mighty Tercel. So there in the dark and cold in the am, I would start the car—and that crazy car always started and when I turned on the radio, at that time, it was always that Cold Play song that goes, “And it was all yellow …” It was so God damned morose and I’d be sucking it up, singing along. I think the worst part of any project, especially in those days, was starting. I arrive and everything is empty, cold and hopeless. I feel the cold damp. I see the trench I am digging for the bathroom drain lines but I also see the layers and layers and layers of all the other projects I have to complete in the next six months to make the place livable before our money runs out.

I remember one day I had to pop over to the local hardware store rather than do the half hour drive to the Home Bleepo to get something quick, a drill bit or a saw blade. I just recall driving down the street past the cafes and restaurants and it was as if I were floating past a Broadway set with all these little tables on the sidewalks and mini dogs dressed in mini dog clothes and arch hip types in black and gray and black and gray and black and gray keen on their laptops other more colorful types quaffing wine or clustered at tables with cups off coffee, throwing back their heads with great guffaws.  My funky self in the habitual work getup covered with stains of paint, dried silicone, sheet rock mud, remnants of expanding foam, torch burns, rips, solder burns and flux … was just floating by, mouth open, kinda dumbfounded, like some sort of troglodyte who had crawled up from the earth. What the f*ck was this?

The point is, at that time, with two jobs, full time day and part time nights and working like a maniac every spare moment I had to get that shell of a house move-in ready, I was always hearing that these were the best years of my life. That was the buzz. These are the best years of your life. Outside of the joy brought by my kid and my wife, I didn’t quite get it. I was just working my ass off.

In reality though, what makes it the best, I guess, in retrospect, is the energy and the vision, the relative absence of heath fears, the habitual eating and drinking whatever I wanted, working from dawn to midnight nonstop for an entire week during vacation with alacrity and focus, living with a feeling of promise. So, I realize now that was it. I guess, younger people, though hard to grasp when you are busting your ass, it is true.

One thing. Oh thirty and forty and fifty somethings, you must never raise your eyes to some glorious imagined horizon. You must never be deceived by snowy haired couples riding bikes in neat Sears and Roebuck attire, smiling with white teeth. Believe me. They are all on some kind of pills. They live in terror. Some or several parts of them barely work anymore and if they are lucky, the teeth were installed, with stabbing cost, through multiple sessions of needles and drilling, socket wrenches and head clouts, screwing of nuts and bolts into bone; the process makes Laurence Olivier’s work in Marathon Man seem like playground shenanigans—you don’t want to know about it. In fact don’t think of it. Ever. Yes. Make a plan, but live now. But again, there’s the rub. Some are loaded. Praise be. That’s wonderful for them. For the vast majority though, they are locked into the economic system. They can’t just drop everything and say screw this I’m out. They have to power on or make a sustainable plan. It has its frustration, but escape plans can be systematically laid while the best years of life must be lived and lived through.